American Thinker: Understanding Climategate's Hidden Decline

Close followers of the Climategate controversy know that much of the mêlée surrounds an email in which Climate Research Unit (CRU) chief Phil Jones wrote about using “Mike’s Nature Trick” (MNT) to “hide the decline.” And yet, 17 days and thousands of almost exclusively on-line op-eds into this scandal, it still seems very few understand exactly which “decline” was being hidden, what “trick” was used to do so, and why Jones’s words have become the slogan for the greatest scientific fraud in history.

As the mainstream media move from abject denial to dismissive whitewashing, CRU co-conspirators move to Copenhagen for tomorrow’s UN climate meeting, intent on changing the world as we know it based primarily on their now exposed trickery. Add yesterday’s announcement of a UN investigation into the matter, which will no doubt be no less corrupt than those being investigated, and public awareness of how and why that trick was performed is now more vital than ever.

So please allow me to explain in what I hope are easily digestible terms.

First and foremost — contrary to what you’ve likely read elsewhere in the blogosphere or heard from the few policymakers and pundits actually addressing the issue, it was not the temperature decline the planet has been experiencing since 1998 that Jones and friends conspired to hide. Certainly, the simple fact that the email was sent in November of 1999 should have allayed any such confusion.

In fact, the decline Jones so urgently sought to hide was not one of measured temperatures at all, but rather figures infinitely more important to climate alarmists – those determined by proxy reconstructions. As this scandal has attracted new readers to the subject, I ask climate savvy readers to indulge me while I briefly explain climate proxies, as they are an essential ingredient of this contemptible conspiracy.

Truth be told — even reasonably reliable instrumental readings are a relatively modern convenience, limiting CRU’s global measured temperature database to a start date somewhere in the mid-19th century. That’s why global temperature charts based on actual readings typically use a base year of 1850 or somewhere thereabouts.

And yet — most historical temperature charts, including the one Al Gore preached before in An Inconvenient Truth, go way back to 1000 AD. That’s where proxies come in.

While historical documents (e,g, ship’s logs, diaries, court and church records, tax rolls, and even classic literature) certainly provide a glimpse into past temperature trends, such information is far too limited and generalized to be of any statistical value. So climate scientists have devised means to measure variations in such ubiquitous materials as lake sediments, boreholes, ice cores, and tree rings to evaluate past temperature trends.

They then employ complex computer programs to combine such “proxy” data sampled throughout a region to plot that area’s annual relative changes in temperature hundreds or even thousands of years prior. By then combining the datasets, they believe they can accurately reproduce hemispheric and global temperature trends of the previous millennia.

And while reconstructions — as past temperature interpretations from proxy data are called — can differ greatly from one source to another, those generated by the CRU have often been accepted as the de facto temperatures of the past.

Largely because the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) proclaims them to be.

Warmist Public Enemy Number One: The Medieval Warming Period

It’s important to understand that early analyses of these “proxies” clearly demonstrated that three radical temperature shifts occurred within the past millennium, as do many contemporary studies. Indeed, the years 900-1300 AD were labeled the Medieval Warming Period (MWP), as global temperatures rose precipitously from the bitter cold of the previous Dark Ages to levels several degrees warmer than today. The Little Ice Age, a sudden period of cooling, then followed and lasted until the year 1850. And then began the modern warming period, which was by no means unique and appears to have ended with the millennium itself.

Originally, even the IPCC accepted that pre-20th century analysis. In fact, the 1990 First Assessment Report used this schematic IPCC 1990 Figure 7c (courtesy of Climate Audit) to represent last millennium’s dramatic temperature swings.

But this image of a fluid climate system subject to abrupt and natural up-and-downturns made unprecedented 20th century warming about as marketable as Florida swampland. And opportunists who depended on the aberrance of post-industrial revolution warming in order to condemn and control mankind’s CO2 emissions soon recognized that perhaps the LIA but most certainly the MWP simply had to go.

And as many of these hucksters were closely connected to the IPCC – both sender and recipient names on those illuminating CRU emails include many of its editors, lead authors and contributors — that task was far less daunting than one might imagine.

Proxies, Tricks and Hockey Sticks

The first step was taken in the 1995 Second Assessment Report, when the above Figure 7c was replaced with a 1993 reconstruction from RS Bradley and Phil Jones himself that used 1400 AD as its base – effectively wiping the MWP off the radar-screen.

But it wasn’t until the 2001 Third Assessment Report (TAR) that the MWP simply vanished. This multi-proxy reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperature anomalies appeared in chapter 2, page 134, of the Working Group 1 (WG1) report [PDF].

IPCC 2001 WG1 Fig 2.20

Of course, the first thing you’ll notice is that both the MWP and LIA have indeed disappeared. In fact, temperatures appear to trend downward throughout the millennium until a sharp jump upward last century. But if you look closer, you’ll also notice that the “reconstructed” series terminate in 1980. What forms the dramatic blade to the hockey stick shape (yes, this is indeed the famous “Hockey-Stick” graph) is instead the distal segment of the 1902 to 1999 instrumental data series.

Mann has recently claimed that the available proxy data ended in 1980, but even his coconspirators at RealClimate admit that’s nonsense. The truth is that the proxy data was scrapped because unlike those measured, reconstructed temperatures showed a marked decline after 1980. And, as the chart plotted temperature anomalies against what the plotters selected as the “normal” period and temperatures of 1961 to 1990, the reconstruction would have been quite unremarkable otherwise. So at the 1980 mark, the actual post-1980 measurements were actually attached to the truncated proxy series to create the illusion they were one.

The figure below, found on the same page of the WG1 report reveals this trick more clearly. This chart plots the original 4 reconstructions used: 2 from Mann et al, 1 from Jones et al and 1 from Briffa et al. Notice how all but the first series continue to trend downward around 1960 while instrumental readings begin to trend upward? And even that series ends abruptly in 1980.

IPCC 2001 WG1 Fig 2.21

So not only did conspirators cherry-pick the one series of the four that approximated measured temperatures the longest, they also terminated that series at the point that it too, began to trend down. They then joined it to the actual 1980-1999 temperatures to “hide the decline” in the final product, as that decline created an inexplicable divergence between the reconstructed and measured temperatures. The existence of which challenges the entire series dating back to 1000 AD.

Remember, all of the temperatures prior to 1850 were estimated by computer algorithms and no actual readings exist to prove or disprove those figures. So a relatively short window of opportunity exists to test the programs against observations. Had 20th century measured temperatures continued to align with those recreated as smoothly after 1960 as they did previously, then the programmers could declare their code and hence their millennial temperatures sound. But the divergence, if allowed to stand, instead revealed serious design flaws in the proxy reconstructions. Which suggests that just as the decline was dealt with through trickery, so was the MWP.

And it seems that each time the trick was used, its involvement would be more deeply concealed.

Every multi-volume IPCC Assessment has been accompanied by a relatively brief and highly-politicized Summary for Policymakers (SPM). This synopsis invariably commands the bulk of the media and political attention. Here’s the version of the graph depicted prominently on page 3 of the 2001 TAR SPM [PDF], the only version of the report most policymakers and reporters would ever actually see. Notice how they further obscured their chicanery by omitting the series defining legend and the “1988 instrumental value” declaration:

IPCC 2001 SPM Fig 1b

And despite the fact that the only confirmable segment of the series failed that very test, which should have declared the entire series null and void, the chart’s caption informed policymakers that:

“the rate and duration of warming of the 20th century has been much greater than in any of the previous nine centuries. Similarly, it is likely that the 1990s have been the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millennium.”

And it’s this highly fraudulent version that has become the poster child of the equally fraudulent Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) movement.

Thanks in large part to the trick that hides the decline.

Trick or Cheat

Now we’ll take a closer look at exactly what Jones meant when he wrote that he had “just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Why did Jones refer to the ruse as“Mike’s Nature Trick?”

As die-hard Hockey Team opponents and fans alike already know – the original 600-year version of the now infamous “Hockey-Stick” graph was dubbed MBH98 because it first appeared in the Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes paper Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries [PDF], originally published in the science journal Nature in 1998. And “Mike’s Nature Trick” received its dubious designation among CRU insiders for the very same reason.

As to the rest of the sentence — It seems Jones was working on a cover chart for a forthcoming World Meteorological Organization report [PDF], WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999, when he wrote the email. As the graph would incorporate one reconstruction of his own plus one each from Michael Mann and Keith Briffa, he was informing them that he had used the trick on Mann’s series at the same 1980 cutoff as MBH98, but found it necessary to use 1960 as the cutoff on the Briffa series.

And what I uncovered in the source code told the tale why. While Mann used multiple proxy sources, Briffa’s reconstructions were based solely on a property of annual tree ring growth known as maximum latewood density (MXD). And the MXD-only-driven plots began to diverge from actual temperatures as early as 1960. In fact, while many of CRU’s programs are designed to exclude all data after 1960 for later manual splicing with instrumental data, others employ “fudge factors” to force the generated plot to more closely adhere to measured temperatures as far back as 1930.

And as you’ll soon see, Jones’s admitted use of MNT took it to an entirely new level of fraud.

Here’s the original reconstruction, with the three proxy and measured temperature (black) series intact:

Notice how Briffa’s series (green) begins to trend sharply downward around the mid-20th Century. Jones’s series (red) soon follows but less sharply and then begins to trend higher. Mann’s (blue) appears to flatten out around the same year that Jones’s begins to fall. Meanwhile, all three have broken with the measured rising temperatures of the late 20th Century.

Now take a look at the chart actually published by the WMO, with all three proxy series having been surreptitiously subjected to MNT:

Since the release of CRU’s FOI2009, alarmists have continued their claim that there’s nothing deceptive about the “trick” and that it has been openly discussed in scientific journals like Nature since 1998.

But I defy anyone to compare the above chart – the one Jones wrote he had applied MNT to – to the unadulterated version above it, and tell me there’s been no deception committed. At least with MBH98, a sharp eye might recognize the ruse. Here — there is no indication given whatsoever that the graph represents an amalgam of proxy and measured temperatures. This, my friends, is fraud.

And I hope that those investigating the fraud will carefully consider this explanation of his WMO cheating given last week by Jones: [my emphasis]

“One of the three temperature reconstructions was based entirely on a particular set of tree-ring data that shows a strong correlation with temperature from the 19th century through to the mid-20th century, but does not show a realistic trend of temperature after 1960. This is well known and is called the ‘decline’ or ‘divergence’. The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste. CRU has not sought to hide the decline. Indeed, CRU has published a number of articles that both illustrate, and discuss the implications of, this recent tree-ring decline, including the article that is listed in the legend of the WMO Statement figure. It is because of this trend in these tree-ring data that we know does not represent temperature change that I only show this series up to 1960 in the WMO Statement.”

And they’ll immediately recognize the dishonest denial they’re dealing with when they read the WMO Statement figure from the inside cover Jones referred to:

“Northern Hemisphere temperatures were reconstructed for the past 1000 years (up to 1999) using palaeoclimatic records (tree rings, corals, ice cores, lake sediments, etc.), along with historical and long instrumental records. The data are shown as 50-year smoothed differences from the 1961–1990 normal. Uncertainties are greater in the early part of the millennium (see page 4 for further information). For more details, readers are referred to the PAGES newsletter (Vol. 7, No. 1: March 1999, also available at http://www.pages.unibe.ch) and the National Geophysical Data Center (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov).”

Even if MNT had been explained as Jones claimed — which it wasn’t — just how was the observer expected to differentiate the reconstructed from the actual data? And good luck finding that newsletter.

Spin it anyway you want – Mike’s Nature Trick is Phil’s WMO cheat.

More Tricks of the Charade

While suddenly the most famous, Mike’s is not the only in CRU’s bag of tricks.

Many of the programs I reviewed contained routines to exclude proxy data that demonstrated poor correlations with local temperature, which of course explains why CRU’s 19th through mid-20th century proxy temperatures appeared to be observationally accurate. Others “estimated” values for missing data.

And then there’s the Yamal matter – also a popular subject of the CRU emails.

In an October 5th email to climatologist Tom Wigley, Jones took issue with a piece I had written that day exposing the lies in CRU-based UN climate reports, which included a section on Keith Briffa’s mistreatment of Polar Ural data in order to exaggerate 20th century warming. That email prompted the reply from Wigley — now familiar to AT readers — in which he admitted it was “distressing to read that American Stinker item,” before offering to help Briffa, who “does seem to have got himself into a mess,” write an “explanation” for his deceitful cherry-picking of Yamal peninsula data.

Indeed, Keith’s Yamal Trick also “fudged” proxy reconstructions, not by overwriting them with instrumental data ala Mike, but rather by underhandedly stacking the actual dataset with trees hand-picked to assure his predetermined outcome. Yet both methods intentionally corrupted reconstruction results for the same devious purpose — to skew late 20th century temperatures higher in order to artificially create the dreaded hockey stick effect.

Now, you might be wondering why all this fuss is being made over late 20th century temperatures when even we realists accept that they did rise until 1998. Hopefully, you now understand why the divergence between proxy and measured temperatures betrays a potential serious flaw in the process by which temperatures are reconstructed from tree-ring density. And that any reconstruction demonstrating such a flaw-revealing divergence should be dismissed outright, not presented as policy fodder.

But there’s another issue at stake here.

Anthony Watts has surveyed over 75% of the 1200-plus U.S weather stations from which national temperatures are accumulated. Most of those were found to be inaccurate by more than 2°C, largely due to being located within 10 meters of an artificial heating source. In fact, less than 10% met strict placement guidelines set forth by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Not to worry — NOAA claims it has methods to “adjust” for such bias, including the use of “smoothing” adjustments to “homogenize” station data to that of surrounding stations.

Would you be shocked to learn that at ICCC 3, Watts told us he had calculated such adjustments to raw temperature data between 1940 and 1999 to be 0.5°F to the positive? That accounts for almost one half of the 1.2°F warming over the last century.

And that’s here in America. Try to imagine what kind of shenanigans might be going on elsewhere in the world.

Consequently, even the “instrumental” temperatures the CRU crooks were fudging their results to align with were likely themselves fudged. So they were pumping the incline while hiding the decline.

Hold the Fudge and the MWP won’t budge

In a June 2003 email to Jones and company, Mann discussed the notion of expanding CRU charts to 2 millennia, in an effort to ‘try to “contain” the putative “MWP.”’ No deception in that, I suppose. Of course, an honest 2000 year reconstruction, such as this one from CO2Science.org, adapted from a 2005 Moberg et al.temperature history derived from tree-rings and lake and ocean sediments, would actually emphasize rather than “contain” the MWP:

Any questions why Mann and friends work so diligently to “contain” (hide) the MWP?

As you can see, the post-LIA warming that began around 1850 is neither unprecedented nor spectacular. And certainly not worth rewiring the economic circuitry of the planet over.

And the CRU/IPCC reconstructions have been counterfeited for the express purpose of hiding that very fact.

After all, the stakes are enormous – perhaps trillions of dollars and unquestionably every American’s personal liberties. Tomorrow, over 20,000 delegates from 193 nations will gather in Copenhagen to craft an agreement which would not only force American power consumption to levels equal to those of about 1910, but would also have us pay reparations for an imaginary “climate debt” we’ve accumulated by building the world’s greatest economy of all time. That debt is based on the amount of CO2 our financial growth has purportedly pumped into the atmosphere, which, according to the conclusions of the IPCC, based largely upon reports from the CRU, has selfishly imperiled the planet by inducing climate change.

Of course, asking Americans to pay reparations based on the claim they’ve done harm to other nations by spoiling the climate is like asking me to pay damages to my neighbor based on his claim that he can’t sell his house because my great-grandmother’s ghost is haunting it.

As many have known and Climategate has proven, either would be equally preposterous.

I think this is the clearest summary for the lay-person I have seen – there is so much material out there it is difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff! But this could be one to send to your elected representatives……………..

This article hits it right on the head!
If the MWP exists there is no crisis!, no tipping point, no unprecedented warming, no mandate for a new world order and trillions in spending!
What good our proxies if there predictions do not match documented instrumental measurement? None in the scientific world, apparently everything in the political world.

This analysis unfortunately is too hard for 99.9% of citizens. It is excellent science, and well presented, but I wager that there is not one MSM journalist that will read more than a few paragraphs.
That does not mean that WUWT should not post it though. It just means that the Jon Stewarts and Rex Murphys of the media will have 1000 times the impact using comedy and sarcasm.
The only other way to reach the public is for state and federal prosecutors to go after the principals of climategate for fraud.
The perp walk is inevitable for them, if there is any justice system left in the USA or the UK. If I were a third level scientist at CRU I would be seeking immunity right now, in exchange for the inside information on the higher ups. Fraud, destuction of FOI information, conspiracy to commit… there has to be jail time coming for those involved.
JMHO

Excellent article.
But one result of eliminating the MWP and the LIA is the resulting magnitude of the the CO2 + positive feedbacks coefficient placed into the AGCMs to account for low solar effects and for inflated instrument readings. When that GIGO is run out to the year 2100, all of the AGCMs predict doom.

I used to review some of the stations on the GISS dataset that temperatures going back before 1880. Some sets such as DeBilt went back to the early 1700’s. These were removed from the GISS dataset, perhaps because they showed climate variation rather than a monotonic decline. Does anyone know where to find these sets?

Thanks for the excellent and concise explanation. This one (and Rex Murphy’s diatribe against the fraud) are destined to be posted on my door at work. I’ve promised to give a guest talk about the global warming fraud in a colleague’s lecture series, and this summary of exactly what was fraudulent in the actions of Briffa, Jones, Mann et al will be a great help. I was glad to see Anthony’s work mentioned here, too. We are living in interesting times.
I’ve been musing about which of the shadier episodes in the history of science the CRUtape letters most resembles, and how this scandalous misuse of science ranks against other outstanding moments both positive and negative. I really cannot think of a parallel: eugenics built on over a century of scientific racism, but all the participants believed they were being perfectly rational, and the problem was a low standard of evidence and a high level of preconceptions about the role of heredity in controlling behaviour. I certainly can’t think of anything of this scale or kind in recent memory, either – even the problem of the collapse of scientifically-managed fish stocks has more to do with underfunded science, a level of incompetence or wishful thinking in understanding the parameters used to judge the stock sizes, and other factors beyond the control of scientists (political interference or intransigence), the self-serving deceptive actions of fishermen, etc).

So the key question is this:
‘What is the range of probabilities that the Medieval Warm Period was as warm or warmer than today, based on ALL the reviewed science using temperature proxies and how certain are we that the use of temperature proxies is sufficiently reliable to justify using it in this crucial debate?’
Presumably, like in biomedical research, from time to time eminent researchers collate all the literature into accessible reviews, which normally include tables to summarise the current positions held by a variety of academic researchers?
Based on that, where does CRU sit in that compilation of data?
1. As a fairly average representation of a diversity of views?
2. As an outlier showing more extreme variations than 90% of other publications?
3. Initially an outlier 20 years ago, but become increasingly mainstream as research has continued to the present day?
On the outcome of those questions can key deductions be made, me thinks….

Marc, this is a fantastic job across the board; investigation, analysis, construction, explanation; and you’re right in that one only needs to be “climate savvy” , not a scientist, to understand it. This ought to be disseminated as widely as possible. Many thanks for the huge effort that must have gone into this. – Mike Spilligan; UK.

Anthony, thank you for bravely continuing this information. I am very concerned politicians and social scientists will have their day in Copenhaagen.
It appears Brown has latched on to the cause and so perhaps save his party’s future rebuke at the polls.
Mr. Obama is set to be the savior of the world.
In the face of these massive political pressures, somone needs to keep unadulterated information flowing.
I thank you for this.

Speaking to local reporters in the capital, Baku, last week, Mr Blair said the AzMeCo methanol plant, which is backed by £73m of funding from a European development bank, part-owned by the Treasury, was a sign of Britain’s interest in Azerbaijan. His comments appeared to blur the line between his status as a private individual and a former prime minister campaigning for British investment in foreign countries.
During his trip, Mr Blair was also paid tens of thousands of pounds to speak at the £150m AzMeCo factory. His office refused to say who paid for the speech, saying it was through his agents, the Washington Speakers Bureau. Yet the entire speech last Tuesday consisted of praise for the plant, its owners and the President – making it little more than a gold-plated endorsement. He said AzMeCo was “showing the way” in developing clean energy. “This project,” he said “is not just of significance to Azerbaijan, but also the international community and for negotiations we are about to have in Copenhagen – because it shows the way forward.”
Mr Blair, who failed in his attempt to become EU president last month, has amassed an estimated fortune of £10m since leaving office in June 2007. He is a paid adviser to JP Morgan, receives fees through Tony Blair Associates for private consultancy work and speech-making, as well as office costs and expenses in his work as Middle East envoy.

So the scientific analysis has been subject to some unreasonable massaging. It doesn’t mean that polar bears are running out of room; that Bolivia is having to move people out of its capitol due to water shortage because the glaciers are shrinking; the same goes for the Alps and the Himalyas.
The Earth has got hotter and the scientific anlysis has been cooked. Now where do we go from here?
Stephen Bishop UK

So the scientific analysis has been subject to some unreasonable massaging. It doesn’t mean that polar bears are not running out of room; that Bolivia is having to move people out of its capitol due to water shortage because the glaciers are shrinking; the same goes for the Alps and the Himalyas.
The Earth has got hotter and the scientific anlysis has been cooked. Now where do we go from here?
Stephen Bishop UK

I think all of those who read this climategate revelation, should be aware that this delusion about man made global warming is only the latest in a long catalog of similar delusions.
Many others are contained in a delightful book in several volumes by Charles Mackay, and called ‘Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions’, obtainable free from the Gutenberg press, on the internet.
It makes interesting reading. In future years this delusion of man-made clmate change will join the other delusions, which were mostly stoked by human stupidity.

Thanks for posting this AT report. I read it earlier this afternnon (here in Germany) and I can only reiterate:
IT’S A MUST READ! AGW is a fraud – period.
Next Fraud:
Hat Tip to EIKE in Germany.
Direct from the science classroom!http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8394168.stm
I CAN’T BELIEVE IT!
How stupid do they think we are!?!?

By the way, BBC made a list on their website about arguments to use against skeptics’.
In particular, relevantly to the great summary written by Marc Sheppard, this is how they deal with the MWP argument:
====
Sceptic
The beginning of the last Millennium saw a “Medieval Warm Period” when temperatures, certainly in Europe, were higher than they are now. Grapes grew in northern England. Ice-bound mountain passes opened in the Alps. The Arctic was warmer in the 1930s than it is today.
Counter
There have been many periods in Earth history that were warmer than today – for example, the last interglacial (125,000 years ago) or the Pliocene (three million years ago). Those variations were caused by solar forcing, the Earth’s orbital wobbles or continental configurations; but none of those factors is significant today compared with greenhouse warming. Evidence for a Medieval Warm Period outside Europe is patchy at best, and is often not contemporary with the warmth in Europe. As the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) puts it: “The idea of a global or hemispheric Medieval Warm Period that was warmer than today has turned out to be incorrect.” Additionally, although the Arctic was warmer in the 1930s than in the following few decades, it is now warmer still. One recent analysis showed it is warmer now than at any time in the last 2,000 years.
====
So basically the MWP didn’t exist (?)
The page with other counter-arguments is in the following link. Can anybody come up with valid counter-counter-arguments?http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8376286.stm

This isn’t fraud at all. The post 1960s decline in temperatures is false whichever way you look at it, so “hiding the decline” is substituting bad data for good. For it to have been fraud he would have had to do it the otherway round – replace good data with bad.
I prefer the reconstruction and proxy data to be plotted seperately and as far as I am aware most of Briffa’s recent graphs do that.
Briffa could have alternatively plotted the proxy reconstruction past 1960, superimposed the instrumental record over the top and written “the divergance of the proxy reconstruction post-1960 is discussed in XYZ”. For one figure in a 10 year old document the difference between that and what he did do imo doesn’t justify the fraud accusation fuss.

Of course the planet warms after an ice age is over. Even a 5th grader can understand that. The years after the little ice age that ended around 1850 are what they wanted to focus on only that period and distract you from the reason why the earth has warming and cooling periods this dramatic, substituting the reason the planet warms is you. It’s your fault. I wonder why they did that?

H/T to EIKE Germany for above link: Their e-mail to me informs:
“What this “Scientist” is not telling the audience what concentration the CO2 has in the bottle. It will be far more the the lousy 0,038 Vol % which the left bottle have, So what she demonstrated was the different heat storage capacity of Carbon dioxide, which is 1,6 times heavier then air. “

Doesn’t it seem that the error bounds in the various IPCC graphs (the ones that include them, at least) are much too narrow in the non-instrumented period? Even in the instrumented period prior to the middle of the last century it was unusual to have temperature readings closer than the nearest degree, which means that the measurement error is ±0.5° (I’m thinking Fahrenheit – maybe half those numeric values for Centigrade…) – leave alone that they are typically looking at averaged high and low monthly temperatures for their recorded temperature history. In the earlier instrumented period, even that accuracy was probably not available. If they are calibrating tree rings against recorded temperatures, they have to have at least the same degree of inaccuracy as the history they are calibrated against, plus whatever standard deviation is introduced in the extrapolation of tree-ring to temperature – which I suspect is not insignificant. You can average away the tree-ring / temperature errors, but I don’t think you can escape the calibration error.
It’s been too long since I did any laboratory science for me to have more than a feeling of unease about this – does anyone have a better level of knowledge about how statistically reliable (ignoring any fudges, deliberate distortions, etc) dendrochronology could ever be? The same calibration error would apply to all temperature proxies – corals, ice cores, lake sediments, and so on, I would imagine.
Thanks for any input,
Dean

“The Earth has got hotter and the scientific anlysis has been cooked. Now where do we go from here?” Stephen A Bishop
Decentralize! It must be obvious that “unity” is a disaster waiting to happen. The ” science” is not settled in everything from ID to education to economics to climate and perhaps never can be.

Excellent article and much needed, and a must read for all skeptics! Too many people have misinterpreted the “hide the decline”. This article clearly shows how these scientists have manipulated data to create a perception that we are experiencing “unprecedented catastrophic” warming when it really is more likely natural variability that we need to just deal with.

Ethical Britons ditch your TVs and stop paying the TV Licence. You now have options to do just that and avoid funding the BBC.
1. You can watch Sky channels over broadband on your PC or Xbox without the need for a TV Licence.
2. You can watch all manners of video content online.
3. You can now watch TV shows via youtube at http://www.youtube.com/shows
Let’s teach the impartial BBC a lesson for taking our money and then towing the government’s line on this issue to enforce greater taxation upon us.

I’m heartened by this piece and several others I’ve read that are energetically dissecting the breadth and depth of the scandal. It’s complicated, so the learning curve of the average citizen will be gradual but, one hopes, steady. Copenhagen is occurring at a fortuitous time, since it will keep the issues on the front pages.
The person was who blew the whistle on these people really knew what he was doing. The purloining and publishing of these documents was an act of strategic genius.

Mann has recently claimed that the available proxy data ended in 1980, but even his coconspirators at RealClimate admit that’s nonsense. The truth is that the proxy data was scrapped because unlike those measured, reconstructed temperatures showed a marked decline after 1980.

This is muddled in so many ways. The link does not show Mann claiming that available data ended in 1980. The link says:Mann said the “trick” Jones referred to was placing a chart of proxy temperature records, which ended in 1980…
It says the chart ended in 1980, not the data. Actually Mann’s is a multi-proxy set; much of the data does in fact end before 1980, and a more common criticism is of the smoothing techniques to bring the curve up to 1980.
I searched that thread at RealClinate, and could see no admission that ending in 1980 is nonsense.
There is no information, from publication or stolen emails, of Mann’s data beyond 1980. I think Marc is confused with Briffa’s much discussed tree-ring data which has a downturn beyond 1960. Quite different. This “divergence” has been prominently written about by Briffa and others from 1998 onwards.

cthulhu (11:16:30) :This isn’t fraud at all. The post 1960s decline in temperatures is false whichever way you look at it, so “hiding the decline” is substituting bad data for good. For it to have been fraud he would have had to do it the otherway round – replace good data with bad.
!!!!
The only way to look at it is to say:
What do the thermometers say?
What do the satellites say?
A rise from 1960 to 1998? No?
What do the tree numbers say?
A decline from 1960 to 1998.
Therefore the tree numbers have nothing ( or very little ) to do with temperature and have to be distrusted all the way to the medieval warm period.
Trees are not thermometers is the only conclusion that can be taken, and not take the bad tree data and join them to the good instrument data to make a hockey stick.

So what I’m hearing is that despite what Al Gore says, the debate is NOT over. He’s not going to like this.
Great article – I read it twice. Once for my comprehension and another so I can explain to other people.

I have noticed that by deliberately misrepresenting the “hide the decline” context, deniers have been undermining the nonalarmist cause.
I take this opportunity to firmly distance myself from deniers and reject tactics that sacrifice ground (without even gaining anything in trade-off).
MSM journalists, be aware that the terms ‘skeptic’, ‘denier’, & ‘nonalarmist’ are NOT synonymous. There is no across-the-board unity and the issues do NOT divide along left/right political lines, despite the cooperative efforts of alarmist & denialist extremists, desperately fighting to maintain a forbidden no-man’s land in the centre.
All who dare attempt to bridge polarity are stoned viciously by cooperating hate-mongering extremists. Alarmist & denialist extremists have more in common than nonalarmists & deniers. Horseshoe politics at its worst — the extremists share the common cause of festering the issue. (Maybe the shared aim is to have this affect the perceived value & price of something.)
If journalists do not differentiate between nonalarmism & denialism, this is a crystal clear indicator of deliberate distortion [if not a sign of willfully-incompetent ignorance of wide, deep divides and, furthermore, complete failure to grasp the immense complexity of the issue].
I agree with Edb that long blog articles are (generally) a big yawn.

Great article and clearly written
However you say;
“While historical documents (e,g, ship’s logs, diaries, court and church records, tax rolls, and even classic literature) certainly provide a glimpse into past temperature trends, such information is far too limited and generalized to be of any statistical value. So climate scientists have devised means to measure variations in such ubiquitous materials as lake sediments, boreholes, ice cores, and tree rings to evaluate past temperature trends.”
I will take observations and records over complex proxies any day. These sort of very extensive records(not limited at all) provide a thread of observational evidence that can be linked to instrumental data from 1660 onwards.
My Little Ice age thermometers project has now been updated with additional pre 1850 instrumental temperature data, plus articles and links.
It is clear that Mobergs graph was wrong, in as much whilst the LIA can be characterised as cold (very cold at time) it also had many warm periods. Moberrg missed out a key warm period one around 1730http://climatereason.com/LittleIceAgeThermometers/
Tonyb

Tomorrow is also the day Obama’s and Wall Street’s stooges in the EPA will announce CO2 must be regulated. I reckon they will later assume Fed like powers and impose cap and trade without congress’ approval. Do they dare do it tomorrow for Obama’s coming out debutante ball? He needs to deliver something to the “world,” his earlier trip to Europe failing that. The media, deathly afraid to call their god a phony huckster, will report the EPA action as progress. NPR will take on grave, approving tones, noting how there will still be a struggle against white beer swilling primitives in the hinterlands (who else could the deniers only be?).

Obama initially intended to “pop in” for the start of Copenhagen, apparently, to create political cover for the likely eventuality of no agreement. Now he is said to have changed plans to arrive at “the climax” of the event. This suggests some deal has been struck with China and/or India, and this can only mean one thing: A promise of a Gigantic transfer of wealth from the USA to those nations. In spite of a warning from Democrat leadership not to sign any checks in Copenhagen, I fear this is precisely what will happen. No amount of factual revelation will stop the political march to the far left. Now we can only hope to eventually unravel the damage.

Actually it isn’t all that complicated. All they did was stop using tree ring proxies after 1980 because they showed a temperature decline. So instead they spliced the instrumental temps. What about the divergence? Well, you know…whatever, just forget about it…it’s not about science anyway…

“Paul Vaughan”
What you said, “yawn.”
It is simple for what “journalists” should suspect. That you can believe CO2 is a GHG. That it has “some” effect. That the effect is incredibly small. That this fact is hidden because it would undermine the global warming industry, public and private sectors. That is why the warming is “fixed”.

EdB: Even though letters to our political representatives referring to this excellent analysis would cause their brains to seize up, at least they might get the scary idea that the public is not as dense as they might have hoped.

Someone has to get Glenn Beck to put together a segment on how they did this.
Heck this ought to be easy compared to the web of cronies he was laying out a couple months back. This would be right up his alley.

Agreed a good post – perhaps I will print it and frame it in the hallway.
The other point of course is that if the climate were so doom laden sensitive to an increase in CO2 then we would not be here at all.
Some time a go a contestant in the first round the world yacht race, the poor Donald Crowhurst, realised he was going to lose the race and lose his business as a result. So he faked his log, turned back less than half way round intending to sneakily join in on the way back.
The deception drove him mad. He disappeared, presumed to have committed suicide.
So you see there is a precedent.

anna v (11:49:03) :
sure and that applies to post-1960s. Whether that also impacts the reconstructions further back in time is an acedemic question. If Briffa doesn’t believe it does and he thinks the reconstruction is sound until 1960 then cutting the reconstrution off and using the instrumental record is valid.

Akira….
University of Alberta…. Vikings in Greenland…http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id=776
This article from 2001 suggests Vikings lived and farmed in Greenland for 400+ years, all through the MWP timeline.
The Vikings had warmer temps than we have, for sure,
…as there ISN’T any farming there today.

Along with the previously posted Weekly Standard piece ”Scientists Behaving Badly”, this in-depth American Thinker article is on the keeper list.
There is still the big gap between this level of detail (still only a summary; albeit an excellent one), and the very limited ”sound-bite” attention span of the MSM and their legions of listeners. But at least the quality info is out there in quantity in the blogosphere; and via FoxNews, the Weekly Standard, American Thinker, IBD, and several other fairly prominent print/web/video media outlets; for those who are seriously interested in the facts; i.e.:
It feels like critical mass has been reached WRT the availability of the INFORMATION. Whether or not that will translate into near-term critical mass WRT the correct ACTIONS (the world AVOIDS continuing on the current truly stupid track at COP15) remains to be seen.
This piece by AT again reminds me of the profound comment I saw recently (can’t recall where, given current info overload):
Especially in developed countries, environmentalism in general and climate change in particular have become convenient code words for minimizing, reducing, & obstructing everything EXCEPT ever-more intrusive government.
And:
The thermomanics and their far-left ”rent-a-mob” supporters will ride the ”climate change” train as long as they possibly can, regardless of the science, because they see it as the most promising avenue to impose their dark vision of what the world order should be.

cthulhu wrote: “This isn’t fraud at all. The post 1960s decline in temperatures is false whichever way you look at it, so “hiding the decline” is substituting bad data for good.”
Except there are no thermometer records stretching back thousands of years so the “bad” data wasn’t replaced with “good” data. *Part* of the “bad” data was chopped off because it could be proven to be “bad”. The rest of the proxy data can neither be proven to be “good” nor “bad”. It is *assumed* it’s “good” because it correlates with modern tempertures, except, as you point out, only part of the data correlates with modern temperature so therefore we have to assume that the whole lot of data is “bad” unless the cause of the correlation failure is known and accounted for. To date it hasn’t been.
The whole issue of hiding the decline is to cover up the fact that these proxies do not accurately reconstruct modern temperature and yet they were used as authoritative reconstructions of past temperature. Trickery was used to hide their unreliability. Whether this is fraudulent or not, I don’t know. I do know that it is deliberately misrepresenting the science.

This is doing the rounds in Australia and might interest your readers. It seems the opposition has thrown out this latest grab our money scheme to combat global warming.
The ETS tax (Emission Trading Scheme)
Let’s put this into a bit of perspective for laymen!
ETS is another tax. It is equal to putting up the GST to 12.5% which would be unacceptable and produce an outcry.
Read the following analogy and you will realise the insignificance of carbon dioxide as a weather controller.
Pass on to all in your address book including politicians and may be they will listen to their constituents, rather than vested interests which stand to gain by the ETS.
Here’s a practical way to understand Mr Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
Imagine 1 kilometre of atmosphere and we want to get rid of the carbon pollution in it created by human activity.
Let’s go for a walk along it.
The first 770 metres are Nitrogen.
The next 210 metres are Oxygen.
That’s 980 metres of the 1 kilometre. 20 metres to go.
The next 10 metres are water vapour. 10 metres left.
9 metres are argon. Just 1 more metre.
A few gases make up the first bit of that last metre.
The last 38 centimetres of the kilometre – that’s carbon dioxide. A bit over one foot.
97% of that is produced by Mother Nature. It’s natural.
Out of our journey of one kilometre, there are just 12 millimetres left. Just over a centimetre – about half an inch.
That’s the amount of carbon dioxide that global human activity puts into the atmosphere.
And of those 12 millimetres Australia puts in 0.18 of a millimetre.
Less than the thickness of a hair. Out of a kilometre!
As a hair is to a kilometre – so is Australia’s contribution to what Mr. Rudd calls Carbon Pollution.
Imagine Brisbane’s new Gateway Bridge, ready to be opened by Mr Rudd. It’s been polished, painted and scrubbed by an army of workers till its 1 kilometre length is surgically clean. Except that Mr. Rudd says we have a huge problem, the bridge is polluted – there’s a human hair on the roadway. We’d laugh ourselves silly.
There are plenty of real pollution problems to worry about.
It’s hard to imagine that Australia’s contribution to carbon dioxide in the world’s atmosphere is one of the more pressing ones. And it’s hard to believe that a new tax on everything is the only way to blow that pesky hair away.
After all, the sun controls the climate on our planet, not human beings. Always has, always will. Only the arrogance of human beings over their own importance makes people think otherwise.
Incidentally, the planet has cooled by nearly one degree Celsius in the past hundred years – and that is a hard statistic, which puts the lie to those who claim that the planet has heated.
Pass this on quickly while the ETS is being debated in Federal Parliament.

Best explanation so far of the whole scam. Congratulations. Very important also because it separates the issue of deception (clearly established) from the issue of whether there is anything left in the whole story to worry about (tbd over the next couple of years, I’d guess). Thank you !

vigilantfish (10:43:40) :
….I’ve been musing about which of the shadier episodes in the history of science the CRUtape letters most resembles, and how this scandalous misuse of science ranks against other outstanding moments both positive and negative. I really cannot think of a parallel: …
REPLY
How about Rene Blondlot’s N-rays hoax? The publishing of the e-mails and code is equivalent to removal of the prism http://www.o4sr.org/publications/pf_v5n1/Hoaxes.htm

The graph shown at the top of the article was created by British climatologist professor (Hubert Horace) Lamb1913-1997. Originally worked for the Met office(from 1936), after some ‘methodology’ disagreements in 1972 he left the Meteorological Office and found the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. What irony!
The graph represents Central England temperature over the last 1100 years. It graph uses a combination of thermometer readings for the last 300 or so years, and records of growing seasons before then to infer temperature. It was first published in 1965 and has been updated several times since. The IPCC used the graph in their early publications. The IPCC incorrectly described their graph as “global temperature variations of the last 1000 years,” which is an error. Regardless of the graph’s description, it is important to repeat that this is regional, not global temperature variation.

…”It’s been too long since I did any laboratory science for me to have more than a feeling of unease about this – does anyone have a better level of knowledge about how statistically reliable (ignoring any fudges, deliberate distortions, etc) dendrochronology could ever be? The same calibration error would apply to all temperature proxies – corals, ice cores, lake sediments, and so on, I would imagine.
Thanks for any input,”
Dean
Reply.
AJ STRATA did a wonderful analysis of just that issue (error) here: http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11420
Thanks again AJ for all the great work you are doing.

Jason (11:59:10) :
Tomorrow is also the day Obama’s and Wall Street’s stooges in the EPA will announce CO2 must be regulated. I reckon they will later assume Fed like powers and impose cap and trade without congress’ approval. Do they dare do it tomorrow for Obama’s coming out debutante ball? He needs to deliver something to the “world,” his earlier trip to Europe failing that. The media, deathly afraid to call their god a phony huckster, will report the EPA action as progress. NPR will take on grave, approving tones, noting how there will still be a struggle against white beer swilling primitives in the hinterlands (who else could the deniers only be?).
Jason
You forgot about Al Bore hiding out from his fellow moonshine guzzling, gun totin’ Tennesseans. Of course their combined carbon foot print not to mention combined net worth is less than half what his is but he wants to increase their taxes anyway.

cthulhu (12:20:41) :
“anna v (11:49:03) :
sure and that applies to post-1960s. Whether that also impacts the reconstructions further back in time is an acedemic question. If Briffa doesn’t believe it does and he thinks the reconstruction is sound until 1960 then cutting the reconstrution off and using the instrumental record is valid.”
And just why would Briffa think the reconstruction is “sound”?

This is a great exposition of the trickery that has been going on in fudging global temperatures. Thanks for all the effort.
How on earth can this be used to break through the wall of AGW propaganda and the obvious circling of wagons that is starting? Thanks for a great piece of work.

The real “hide the decline” seems to have taken place between Briffa 1998 and Briffa 2000. I’d be most interested in any comment on the difference between these two reconstructions. The former shows a large fall in temperatures from 1940 onwards.

Climategate = Pythagoras.
If anyone’s got a little spare time, just check out how similar the life of Pythagoras equates to the present scandal that is climategate. Mathematics, secrecy, inner and outer circles etc, etc (even the outcome might end up the same)….it doesn’t appear that mans interaction with science has changed that much in 2,500 years!

“Stephen A Bishop (11:07:47) :
So the scientific analysis has been subject to some unreasonable massaging. It doesn’t mean that polar bears are running out of room; that Bolivia is having to move people out of its capitol due to water shortage because the glaciers are shrinking; the same goes for the Alps and the Himalyas.
The Earth has got hotter and the scientific anlysis has been cooked. Now where do we go from here?
Stephen Bishop UK”
Well, the earth has not got hotter in 10 years and ocean sea levels have stopped rising. What I cannot understand how Bolivia can have water shortages when the glaciers are shrinking. I would have thought they have too much water until the glaciers have disappeared. Could it be a lack of precipitation rather than a warming that at least has stopped or are there simply too many people for the water available?

One ENORMOUS result of eliminating the MWP and the LIA, not mentioned by American Thinker, is to hammer home the unholy “fit” between the Temperature Hockey Stick and the CO2 Hockey Stick which purports to show a corresponding sudden, never-before-seen rise of CO2. Surprise surprise, the shaft of the CO2 Hockey Stick also depends on questionable measurements, in this case, the CO2 supposedly trapped intact with a time delay, in the ice cores. But here, in another extreme environment, there is a whole can of worms of practical issues, the firnification process, the coring, the extraction, the transport, the storage, the handling, and the testing, each of which has serious problems, IMO, none of which we hear about, outside Jaworowski…

>>Trees are not thermometers is the only conclusion
>>that can be taken,
And if they are not good thermometers, and if groups of trees do not record the same tree-ring patterns (rather recording competition between trees and other factors), then the whole ‘science’ of dendrochronology may be a myth.
Can anyone point to a trial, where a large number of living trees in a locality (a county or state) were cored and were shown to have identical growth patterns??
.

Gail Combs (12:45:11)
REPLY
How about Rene Blondlot’s N-rays hoax? The publishing of the e-mails and code is equivalent to removal of the prism http://www.o4sr.org/publications/pf_v5n1/Hoaxes.htm
Thanks. I looked up the link you provided, and it’s an interesting case, but I was thinking more about scientific theories that have a massive social and economic impact – and then turn out to be hoaxes. I think AGW will set the record (hopefully for all time) and for me the troubling question is whether the scientific establishment will behave as it should, according to the standards of true science, or whether there is now so much intellectually and emotionally invested in defending AGW that ‘post-normal’ science usurps the attempt to be objective. The pursuit of truth and knowledge then would be abandoned in favour of political advocacy and doing what scientists think is ‘best’ for us. I keep thinking the western world will re-awaken and throw off political correctness, but PC seems to be more entrenched than ever – it’s very worrying.

Excellent summary.
My only quibble is that Mann’s comment ‘try to “contain” the putative “MWP”‘ could mean “include the MWP” rather than “limit the MWP.” Of course, the CRU charts couldn’t limit the MWP without including it, or at least part of it.

vigilantfish (10:43:40) : ….I’ve been musing about which of the shadier episodes in the history of science the CRUtape letters most resembles… http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/climategate.php has some very interesting comparisons – even tho I take issue with details there. BTW Mick, Climategate does not remotely equal Pythagoras in what I know. Secrecy can be for good reasons and it can be for bad reasons. Think about it.
Vigilantfish, have you looked up Klyashtorin re fish stocks relating to solar cycles?

ralph (14:46:59) : **** Stop Press ****
Mr Griffin MEP has been appointed as EU representative to the Copenhagen climate conference. Strangely enough, Mr Griffin is the most climate-sceptic […] in the entire EU parliament…
Interesting, indeed. But I’m considering other reasons than yours. Perhaps the tide is turning. Aspiring leaders may want to try to ride the new wave, just like any young challenging stag. However, for this issue, he certainly has my support.

“Akira Shirakawa (11:12:54) :
By the way, BBC made a list on their website about arguments to use against skeptics’.”
Someone else may have answered this already, I have not had time to read all of the responses.
I remember reading a magazine article about the archeology of Machu Picchu. The article mentioned that, at the height of the Inca empire, maize was grown at much higher altitudes in the Andes than is possible today. I noted then, that the time frame given coincided fairly closely with the MWP, but thought no more of it.
I no longer have the article, and I don’t know if it was based on a peer reviewed paper, or not, but if temperatures were warmer in South America at the same time as Western Europe, then it is hard to claim that the MWP was not a global event.
Sorry, it is not much, but it may give you the basis for a literature search.

>>hat Bolivia is having to move people out of its
>>capitol due to water shortage
The fact that La Paz’s population has tripled in a generation might have something to do with it.
The greatest threat to climate, and to the Earth in general, is population – not CO2.
.

ralph (15:30:14) :The greatest threat to climate, and to the Earth in general, is population – not CO2.
Before Evan hands you your head:
1. The Earth is not sentient; so it cannot care.
2. Human being are very sentient.
3. The greatest threat is therefore people who think the earth is too populated with humans.
However, the greatest population control method is prosperity which is most often the result of liberty and minding one’s own business. Pseudo-capitalism is destroying the environment. I will grant, though, that we could easily do without central bankers and their supporters. They have killed millions and destroyed much of nature.

Is this layman’s description OK or can you get someone(Ace of Spades?) to tighten it up and write it up like that for the masses?http://ace.mu.nu/archives/295373.php
By all means fight the good fight here and in all the appropriate places with your approach but remember how their KISS hockey stick worked so damagingly against you. Use that against them like this simple to understand graphic and what they know about their bitumen carparks-http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/climategate_more_man_made_warming_in_new_zealand/
and lastly trust the people on this. There was always something messianic about them and their hidden agenda caravan of true believers and ordinary people began to sense that, the closer these high priests got to their vision splendid and salvation for us all. The polling shows (at least in Australia and the US too by all accounts) their Bulls##t Detectors were beginning to kick in and it only needs a KISS Climategate campaign to send them into overdrive.
‘It’s Climategate people and don’t swallow their dog ate the homework rubbish!’ and ‘You shouldn’t make ice hockey sticks from tree rings!’ (with their graph and those 2 NZ ones attached and that carpark) Keep it simple and keep on target for the right market. Horses for courses approach and send both approaches to all the politicians. They can take their pick.

David Reese (10:30:33) : I used to review some of the stations on the GISS dataset that temperatures going back before 1880. Some sets such as DeBilt went back to the early 1700’s. These were removed from the GISS dataset, perhaps because they showed climate variation rather than a monotonic decline. Does anyone know where to find these sets?
Most of the old stuff is in the GHCN data set available from NCDC. I can not testify as to any “improvements” done to it. Directions on downloading it are in the “GISTEMP” tab at the top of my blog where about 1/2 way down it points to this article:http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/ghcn-global-historical-climate-network/
with the details.
Per The Governator: He is just a “hand Puppet” of his spouse, a Kennedy Shriver. What honey want’s, hand puppet does…
And the article above is wonderfully done. Bravo!

Michael (12:55:18), thanks for the video link. I notice Steve Milloy in that video made the same mistake Marc Sheppard warns against, i.e. confusing the concealed proxy temperature decline with an actual temperature decline.
Also, I notice a couple posters above are confusing the discipline of dendrochronology with Mann et al’s dendroclimatology. The former is a reliable method of historical dating, while the latter is a far more dubious method of estimating historical temperatures.

Nick Stokes,
Nick – I like to think I keep a balanced mind about some of the wilder claims ref AQW/non AGW but I think your attempt to discredit this item is a bit stretched.
The point in the article is well made..
1) CRU had a ‘divergence’ problem which meant they switched the proxy for a thermometer.
2) But logic suggests that a divergence problem now, could have therefore happened before, so the whole use of the proxy must be deeply suspect, if not totally invalid.
you can talk about when what got chopped off/who did it to what..but the point remains that the proxies they chose were junked in favour of a temp measurement, which implies the whole thing is junk…you just can’t pretend it isn’t.
So lets agree that the CRu proxies invalidate this temperature reconstuction.
Now…the refrain from the ‘AGW camp’ is that “it does not matter because there are many more studies using different proxies that show a temperature history similar to CRU”.
Well…lets start looking at those now then. We guess already that we may find similar statistical fudging purely because – & this is the clincher – just how likely is it that other studies match CRU’s temperature curves if CRU had used junk proxies to get there? Thats a heck of a coincidence don’t ya think?
Let me say this again, in case I’m not making myself clear…
1) CRU produces figures based on bad proxies
2) These figures match other studies which are supposed to be based on good proxies.
Guys…how the heck does that happen!! Were CRU just not good enough scientists to get the same result as the others? Or maybe…just maybe…all the other results are unattainable unless CRU-like data massaging has occurred?
This is the elephant in the room…….those other studies must be verified now to ensure they are not CRU like. A gambeling man would not bet on the chances.

…and yes, I cringe at people mis-construing ‘hide the decline’ too…….it does not help to have peeps say this, something which AGW-ers can easily throw back. That is not the point of the ‘trick’…….dunno how one gets journo’s who may well not want to hear the context though. Sigh.

Lucy Skywalker (15:14:02) :
ralph (14:46:59) : **** Stop Press ****
“Mr Griffin MEP has been appointed as EU representative to the Copenhagen climate conference. Strangely enough, Mr Griffin is the most climate-sceptic […] in the entire EU parliament…
Interesting, indeed. But I’m considering other reasons than yours. Perhaps the tide is turning. Aspiring leaders may want to try to ride the new wave, just like any young challenging stag. However, for this issue, he certainly has my support”.
Typical EU tactic, involve the most skeptics of you intended policies, make them responsible and burn them down.

There are a many valid points in this article but it starts on a false premise to qute from early in the article
“It’s important to understand that early analyses of these “proxies” clearly demonstrated that three radical temperature shifts occurred within the past millennium, as do many contemporary studies. Indeed, the years 900-1300 AD were labeled the Medieval Warming Period (MWP), as global temperatures rose precipitously from the bitter cold of the previous Dark Ages to levels SEVERAL DEGREES warmer than today. The Little Ice Age, a sudden period of cooling, then followed and lasted until the year 1850. [my capitals]
The magnitude of the little ice age (LIA) and the medieval warm period (MWP) are under serious scientific debate, but the change in global average temperature was certainly not “several degrees”. If it was then the record would not be equivocal, it would be be utterly obvious in every proxy from planktonic foram stable isotopes, to glacial extent, to sea level change. Temperature changes of several degrees cause massive climate change. During the last glacial maximum 10,000 years ago when ice covered most of e.g the UK and New York State and sea levels were about 100m below modern, average global temperatures were only about 6C below modern.
There is indeed abundant historical evidence that climate changed in the northern hemisphere over the past thousand years to a degree which profoundly effected civilisation, but the scientific argument is whether this was a result of global temperature changes of 0.5C, or 1C, or 1.5C, or just regional temperature changes.
For the future the predictions, based on straightforward physics are for 2C plus global warming, If you accept the obvious historical evidence for significant climate change over the 1000 years in the northern hemisphere caused by 2C change.

David Reese (10:30:33) :
I used to review some of the stations on the GISS dataset that temperatures going back before 1880. Some sets such as DeBilt went back to the early 1700’s. These were removed from the GISS dataset, perhaps because they showed climate variation rather than a monotonic decline. Does anyone know where to find these sets?
—
De Bilt is in The Netherlands, and is the home city of KNMI, short for the Royal Dutch Met Office.
Although part of their website (www.knmi.nl) has been translated in english, I’m not sure whether 100% of the site has been.
A short search revealed http://www.knmi.nl/klimatologie/daggegevens/antieke_wrn/index.html where some data can be downloaded. Some metadata is in the files, partly english, partly dutch.
The first table seems to have original data. The second table (the one labelled “Diverse Antieke Reeksen” = “Various Ancient Series”) is processed data, where data from various stations has been combined.
Note: The earliest info is *not* from De Bilt, but from Delft. From a quick view at the metainfo, it looks like the station in De Bilt opened in 1897.

Is that Mr Griffin as in Nick Griffin of the BNP?
Eeek.
Thats a clever move if so, showing climate sceptics as BNP supporters….hmmm…someone earned their corn today.
Please tell me its not who I think it is. You can tell a persons character by the people they associate with…I really do not want to be associated with Nick Griffin. And my enemys enemy is not necessarily my friend..

Lucy Skywalker (15:05:17) :
Vigilantfish, have you looked up Klyashtorin re fish stocks relating to solar cycles?
Hi Lucy:
No I am not familiar with Klyashtorin’s work with solar cycles and fish, but am aware of a couple of early 20th century scientists who saw links between fish abundance and solar cycles. That work pretty much died down and I was not aware that anyone else had been looking at it – I will eagerly look up your suggestion. Thanks for the tip.

I’m currently watching the History Channel’s “Winston Churhill”.
Somehow Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons seems so appropriate:
” . . . If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”
It does seem as though we are engaging in a battle in which the outcome will have broad and possibly dire consequences for the future.

DaveJR (12:35:43) :
Thanks for saving me time. I am constantly amazed by the understanding of scientific method the AGWers reveal. Part of the data doesn’t agree with your theory, so you replace it with some that does, which is a good thing because you are replacing bad data with good so it can’t be fraud. Breathtaking!

So, here is the deal with “Hide e decline” as I see it –
Climate alarmist removed any evidence from published information that tree rings are poor thermometers to avoid “giving ammo to skeptics to muddle the waters” (paraphrasing), but they do insist that “divergence” does not really mean that trees are poor thermometers, because they discussed divergence issue openly in many papers before that “unfortunate” e-mail, so all it is is just bad choice of words.
Just to make sure, why would they believe that threes are good thermometers up to 1960s and bad after? Can anyone in the know summarize the papers that discusses the divergence issue and see if they have any leg to stand on?

cthulhu (11:16:30) :
This isn’t fraud at all. The post 1960s decline in temperatures is false whichever way you look at it, so “hiding the decline” is substituting bad data for good. For it to have been fraud he would have had to do it the otherway round – replace good data with bad.
————————————–
You miss the point.
The fraud exists not in the substitution/mixing of data from reconstructios and actual measruement, but in the substitution/mixing of that data without specifying that you have done so. The reader is left with the impression that all of the data points in the reconstruction are from proxies, when, in fact, they are not. Of course, they could not POSSIBLY have stated what they had done because every reputable climate scientist would have had to reject thier work as invalid.
If the post 1980 /1960 proxy reconstruction temperatures diverge as much as it appears from actual temperature measurements in the same period, it calls into question the accuracy of the entire 1,000 year proxy reconstruction. They purpetrated this fraud not to ‘hide the decline’, but to hide the fact that thier work is useless and invalid.
I always wanted the difference to be due to logical or procedural error, but, based on these emails and the computer code, I have no choice but to consider it an effort to purposefully decieve — a fraud.

I’m not expert but isn’t this a little odd.
The graph shown as IPCC 2001 WG1 Fig 2.21 says its showing the Northern Hemisphere temps but only one of the five data sets used are from the northern hemisphere — two are full hemisphere and two are “extra-tropical” – I presume that’s north and southern combined.

Is the next expose’ in the CO2 measurements,
Hasn’t Jaworowski expressed similar concerns about manipulation of ice core proxy data used on reconstruction of 19th and 20th century CO2 levels visa vi actual CO2 physical measures disclosing CO2 levels significantly higher than proxy data for the period before 1959?

…as there is another MikeF posting I’m going to be known as the artiste formally known as mikeF….or mikeF2 for short.
And bizarrely the other MikeF puts it exactley as I see it….which is getting a bit weird now. Doppleganger.
Comment on Jeremy Y…..yes I take your point ref ‘several degrees’ but that does not really change the context of the message, which is yes the MWP/LIA did actually exist and these recontructions under scutiny are trying to diminish them/are failed reconstructions/therefore modern warming is not unprecedented. I do not hold with your arguement about the MWP/LIA being some kind of localised event, because that Mann’s get out of jail card, hoping no-one would notice that the southern hemisphere consists of..er..water mainly, so its difficult to prove/disprove. One might as easily say there is no global warming at all today because the southern hemisphere does not really show it, but when sceptics argue that point AGW-ers say but its only due to a lack of climate gathering in the SH……..you can’t have it both ways no?

Bill Marsh – perfectley put.
THIS is the message that needs to be got out. I see alot of arm waving and AGW-ers trying to lead sceptics up a diff path away from this point.
If I was a Dendro I’d be in tears right now.

4 billion (17:37:00) : Amusing that American Thinker and CO2 science have doctored the Loehle graph to be Moberg 2005
Actually they have similar graphs of proxy reconstructions, Moberg’s is on top:http://i46.tinypic.com/2lcvct1.jpg

So, let me see if I have this straight:
“We have proven that late 20th century warming is unprecedented based on temperature reconstructions based on tree ring data. In the late 20th century, our reconstruction shows a decline in temperature. We know this decline in temperature to be wrong, so we have thrown that part of the reconstruction away and replaced it with the surface temperature record which shows unprecedented late 20th century warming relative to our temperature reconstruction. Hence, we have shown that late 20th century warming is unprecedented.”
Have I got this right?

No matter how you look at it, there really is no point in this meeting in Copenhagen taking place. The science is discredited, regardless of whether it is true or not. The refusal to release the original data sets is sufficient in itself to render the figures and graphs suspect. Most unscientific an absolutely unacceptable.
There is only one solution – scrap all the prognostications to date and start again. Reveal all to the people and let us see what comes out.

Oh and I’m sorry but I find this behavior from a purported “scientists” reprehensible. And grounds alone to throw the whole stinking lot of climate “scientists” and their peer reviewers in s-can.” This isn’t science – it is out and out fraud. On our dollars.

Akira Shirakawa (11:12:54) :
“By the way, BBC made a list on their website about arguments to use against skeptics’.”
I hope a thread will be created here to respond point by point to each of their rebuttals. Many of our counter-counterpoints have already been written and posted in diverse places, and the BBC’s list will have the virtue of motivating us to collect them in one place.
Maybe each of their “counters” could be given a separate thread, and all of the threads either “pinned” or posted under a separate “Counterpoints” tab?
==========
Regarding the hockey stick, here’s Monckton’s long paper describing the shenanigans behind protecting it from criticism and “verifying” it, followed (pages 16-29) by summaries of 21 published papers that provide evidence of warming during the MWP. (Ten papers deal with Europe and the North Atlantic, eleven scientific papers address the period elsewhere on the planet.) Each summary occupies about half a page and contains a graph that illustrates key data points.http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/what_hockey_stick.html

The MWP is key. All the rest doesn’t matter as far as the science goes, but, of course, is damaging to the AGW cause. I think that a do-over of the last 160 years won’t change much even if done openly and correctly. So, one should concentrate on the MWP. Perhaps some pastoral imagery showing Vikings in Greenland might be an antidote to swimming polar bears looking for ice floes.

You had me until the reparations paragraph. To a lawyer, that is an exceedingly bad analogy.
Assume you and I are neighbors. A heavy rainfall occurs and I divert water from my home that thereafter spills onto your property flooding your home. It wasn’t my fault the rain fell, nor that gravity pulled the water onto your property and caused you damage. If, but for my diverting water to save my home, the water would not have caused you damage, I have in saving myself caused you harm. Law would have me pay you reparations.
If indeed our industrial production has caused others harm, then law would grant a remedy to injured others. I think this is the logical/legal thread underpinning the Carbonhagen Party.
Ordinarily the aggrieved party has the burden of proving injury, causation, and damages.
Until now, the warmist orthodoxy seemed to have a basis for alleging injury. They alleged a prima facie case for causation, CO2, the source of which is plausible — huge manmade CO2 emissions spike and rising CO2 levels.
Damages are speculative. In the U.S., speculative damages are not awarded to plaintiffs.
For example, one could plausibly argue that the reason African nations have by and large failed to cease camping out instead of building microchips or writing computer programs is due to lack of infrastructure and education, not because of U.S. CO2 emissions. The lack of infrastructure and education being due not for failure of the U.S. to pay millions and billions in foreign aid to such countries, but because the leadership in those recipient countries has failed to utilize the U.S. resources as intended. E.G., the ability of Yasser Arafat to amass a fortune in the billions while under house arrest in Palestine is indeed impressive until one begins to account for the $900 million annually paid to the PLO by the U.S. Perhaps a few of those dollars were retained by Arafat instead of building infrastructure?
The issue, then, is really why are other countries less prosperous than the U.S.? For warmists the answer is that the U.S. is too adept at burning hydrocarbons. Discerning the real answer is only slightly less complex than creating a 100% accurate to two decimal places global temperature proxy for the last 5 million years.

And as you’ll soon see, Jones’s admitted use of MNT took it to an entirely new level of fraud.
I’m not expert but isn’t this true for another reason (maybe more important) — according to MBH98, MANN et al in MBH98 only were fidddling back to 1400 ie AFTER the MWP and essentially flattened the LIA. Jones was now doing something similar all the way back to 1000 so he could flatten out the MWP as well now as well as fixing up the 1900-1995 period as the software seems to do.

vigilantfish (10:43:40) :
I don’t have a scientific example, but Tim Donaghy, an ex-NBA referee is definitely a good social example. I don’t think that there has ever been such a big officiating scandal swept under the carpet. It is bigger than the Black-Sox, for sure. Sports radio out.

Marsh wrote: “This isn’t fraud at all. The post 1960s decline in temperatures is false whichever way you look at it, so “hiding the decline” is substituting bad data for good. For it to have been fraud he would have had to do it the otherway round – replace good data with bad.”
You don’t get it, Marsh, even though it was carefully spelled out for you. The problem is simple: If the tree ring data is not good after 1960, why is it good before 1960? Why trust one set of data and not the other one? They come from the same trees, no? The fact that there is a divergence is highly suspect, to say the least. Either tree ring data is unreliable or the actual temperature sensors are faulty (heat island effect probably). You can’t use both for your graph and therein lies the fraud.
This is not rocket science, man. It’s really elementary stuff. You must be a climate scientist because you are condescending to the public who pays for your funding. Your argument is truly lame. Think about it.

Akira Shirakawa (11:12:54)
Here’s a study published 4 March 2009 that counters the BBC counter in regard to the MWP. A link to the complete study follows the abstract.
_____________________________________
A. J. Chepstow-Lusty et al. Putting the rise of the Inca Empire within a climatic and land management context
Abstract
The rapid expansion of the Inca from the Cuzco area of highland Peru produced the largest empire in the New World between ca. AD 1400–1532. Although this meteoric rise may in part be due to the adoption of innovative societal strategies, supported by a large labour force and standing army, we argue that this would not have been possible without increased crop productivity, which was linked to more favourable climatic conditions. A multi-proxy, high-resolution 1200-year lake sediment record was analysed at Marcacocha, 12 km nor th of Ollantaytambo, in the heartland of the Inca Empire. This record reveals a period of sustained aridity that began from AD 880, followed by increased warming from AD 1100 that lasted beyond the arrival of the Spanish in AD 1532. These increasingly warmer conditions allowed the Inca and their predecessors the opportunity to exploit higher altitudes from AD 1150, by constructing
agricultural terraces that employed glacial-fed irrigation, in combination with deliberate agroforestry techniques. There may be some important lessons to be learnt today from these strategies for sustainable rural development in the Andes in the light of future climate uncertainty.
_______________________http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/5/771/2009/cpd-5-771-2009.pdf

Hopefully politicians in the key countries have realised that the combination of peak oil and the unstable cauldron of the Middle East is so potentially dangerous as to warrant an accelerated shift to alternative, non-oil sources of energy irrespective of climate change, which then becomes a convenient cover for this strategic shift.

Leif Svalgaard (21:15:24) :
The MWP is key.
Spot on Leif. The acronym MWP occurs 91 times in the email cache. The word Medieval 51 times.
That’s nearly 10% of all the emails and is a reflection of the fact that the hockey jockey’s know the reality of the MWP is fatal to their hype-othesis.Perhaps some pastoral imagery showing Vikings in Greenland might be an antidote to swimming polar bears looking for ice floes.
Got anything in the family album? 🙂

David Reese (10:30:33) :
DeBilt is sill in v2.mean back to 1706. Grep “633062600000”. There a quite a few more in there that go back 150+ years.Al Gore’s Holy Hologram (11:41:17) :You now have options to do just that and avoid funding the BBC.
The tax isn’t a BBC tax it is effectively a tax on the ability to watch moving pictures in your home. Watching only SKY or even YouTube still requires a licence.
OT but the formal decision by the BBC to not report contrary evidence will hopefully come back to bite them in a big way. They simply had no right to decide what is or is not science.
If you look at the FOI related mails you see the pattern. Jones doesn’t want to abide, he convinces UEA FOI people then they all go together to convince the ICO. At no stage were other opinions sought.(from the “FROM SEESAW TO WAGON WHEEL” report)

The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus.

No prizes at all for guessing who “some of the best scientific experts” were.
Hey.. we invited Enron Directors to our seminar and they say reports of a scandal have no basis in fact.
The bong fuelled meetings over at the BBC “Science and Environment” love fest may soon come to an abrupt end. A sad loss to “journalism”.

In a real world you would get the front page ! But in today’s world it would ruin the bean feast. I personally am convinced that 60/70% of those in Copenhagen would agree with you,
but why rock the boat, the girls are going to be FREE !

vigilantfish (17:27:06) :
Lucy Skywalker (15:05:17) :
Vigilantfish, have you looked up Klyashtorin re fish stocks relating to solar cycles?
Hi Lucy:
No I am not familiar with Klyashtorin’s work with solar cycles and fish, but am aware of a couple of early 20th century scientists who saw links between fish abundance and solar cycles. That work pretty much died down and I was not aware that anyone else had been looking at it – I will eagerly look up your suggestion. Thanks for the tip.

Question for Steve McIntyre or anybody who has looked more closely.
Have any papers looked at the divergence problem from the other end? What I mean is rather than asking why the trees don’t match the instruments, asking why the instruments don’t match the trees.
It is just that the period of divergence is around what I would call a controversial period in v2.mean. Around 1950 a lot of stations join and at the time a lot of duplicate years appear. Then around 1990 a lot of stations disappear and so do duplicate years.
Sorry if this is “old ground” but I couldn’t find much written about it on the net and I don’t currently have access to ppv science.

>>I notice a couple posters above are confusing
>>the discipline of dendrochronology with Mann
>>et al’s dendroclimatology
Not so.
If temperature does not control tree-ring size, and other local effects are exert a greater influence, then how can you compare and overlap tree rings from different trees to form a contiguous series of rings back into history??
As I said, if tree-rings are not sensitive to temperature/weather/climate, then it is not only dendroclimatology that falls flat on its face, but so does dendrochronology too.
,

>>Is that Mr Griffin as in Nick Griffin of the BNP? Eeek.
>>Please tell me its not who I think it is.
>>I really do not want to be associated with Nick Griffin.
>> Mr Griffin’s EU Global Warming speech:
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-DEz2fXPrM
I believe so.
But do you not see this as two sides of the same coin? The whole AGW project is socialist/liberal/marxist inspired, and so they will denigrate anyone who is right wing, just as much as they will denigrate sceptics.
That is why everyone is labeled as ‘Deniers’ (with obvious connotations).
It is odd that something as global and cross-party as climate has become a party-political issue, but it has. And as far as I can see it has become party-political because AGW IS A POLITICAL CRUSADE – and we need to see it and judge in in that light.
.

This ( Marc Sheppard’s) is the best explanation of the issue I’ve seen.
The ‘decline’ tells us that there are 2 possibilities.
1. The observations are wrong
2. The proxy reconstruction is wrong.
They could, of course, both be wrong but the proxy reconstructions are likely to be the most unreliable. Leif Svalgaard (21:15:24) : is right. The Met Office data, whatever it’s reliability, is largely irrelevant. It will almost certainly show an increase in global temperatures. Sceptics should not get bogged down with arguments about the reliability of the data. There’s a good chance that that particular argument will be lost. It’spossibly worth asking questions about the pattern of the warming, e.g. why is the rate of warming in 1915-1945 period pretty much the same as it was in the 1975-2005 period. But the key question concerns the uniqueness of modern day warming. Mann, Jones et al argue it is unique or ‘unprecedented’.
The public are confused about the issues so they need to be made clear which means that focus needs to be on the MWP and the efforts to show that it was a a real and widespread event.

I agree with Leif that whether the MWP got ‘squashed’ by ignoring the post-1960 decline is the major issue here; the code is an irrelevance. Whether the dendroclimatology (thanks Gary) is valid seems to hinge on the question of whether the trees always “peak clip” temperature (and hence would also have done so in the Middle Ages), or whether it’s something new specific to recent times – most likely, an anthropogenic effect. CRU certainly seemed to have assumed the latter; many here would like to assume the former. I don’t know which is right.
But let’s for a moment assume that CRU (and others) are wrong and the MWP really was as warm as today – globally. I’m still not sure that’s the “get out of jail free card” that some people are looking for.
There are plenty of things that are different between then and now:
1) There have been global-scale land use changes – particularly deforestation – between then and now, which could well have reduced the planet’s ability to apply negative feedback and control excursions. Lovelock – despite giving us this inspirational idea of planetary homeostasis in the first place – certainly thinks so.
2) We are continuing to apply external forcings through GHGs which will stress the system even further
3) Human population is massively higher and our society is much more complex and “geared”, making it more, not less, susceptible to underlying change.
So all the traditional “Green” concerns continue to apply. In particular, I’d be very happy to see Copenhagen come up with a mechanism to prevent further, and preferably reverse, deforestation. I can’t see why anyone could object to that, even here!

Woodfortrees,
“I’d be very happy to see Copenhagen come up with a mechanism to prevent further, and preferably reverse, deforestation. I can’t see why anyone could object to that, even here.”
That is something I could get behind. It takes me back to the classic environmental days of the seventies, that were more to do with “saving the rainforests”, “saving the whales.” It was a greener movement then, in the widest sense of the world. Now it seems, everyone wants to rip up rainforests to plant crops for biofuel so we can create less of that airborne fertiliser that makes the world greener. Really sad.

tallbloke (01:28:35) :
Thanks for the link to another Klyashtorin article.
I agree with Leif Svalgaard too. Although conditions today are massively different from in the MWP, as Woodfortrees argues, the MWP does take the air out of the Warm-mongers balloon because their argument is that warming will kill millions and make the world less habitable. This has already been demonstrated abundant times in different threads to be bunk: in Canada and Russia for example, much more land would become arable. You should read a book called “Deforesting the Earth”: many of the environmental arguments for the fall of the Roman Empire have been debunked, for example. Europe has more forest cover than at any point since the 12th century, and the United States has more forest cover, as does Maritime Canada, than in the early 19th century. People fortunate to live in the beginning of the 20th century in North America are probably breathing purer air than any European urban people since the fifth century B.C. owing to the elimination of wood and coal cooking fires and indoors pollution. We do tend to exaggerate the environmental problems that remain here. The situation, unfortunately, is different in highly polluted China, Egypt and other under-developed countries, but the answer is to advance technology, rather than to impose punitive CO2 indulgences on the developed world, to send the money to various dictatorships and undemocratic governments, while lining the pockets of the likes of the Goracle.

cthulhu (12:20:41) :
anna v (11:49:03) :
sure and that applies to post-1960s. Whether that also impacts the reconstructions further back in time is an acedemic question. If Briffa doesn’t believe it does and he thinks the reconstruction is sound until 1960 then cutting the reconstrution off and using the instrumental record is valid.
Have you ever heard of calibration? To use a curve that you suspect would be useful as a thermometer curve, you have to calibrate it during a period where you have instrumental measurements you trust, as from 1960 to 1998 in this case, and see what the past curve tells you, where there are no such trsutworthy instruments to calibrate against. If the most trustworthy interval defies your curve’s tendencies, your curve is not a good thermometer.

In short. The “hide the decline” comment was about one line in one graph out of the multiple lines in multiple graphs that show unequivocally there is warming. It only refers to how to graph the data points to better make an argument. BTW, the decline is there in the graph but is put into context by the actual instrumental record.
I think it is important to report all the different sets of data. With and without tree ring data:
The other problem is that you are looking for problems in the original 2004 paper that since has been superseded by this:
[IMG]http://www.realclimate.org/images/m08.jpg[/IMG]
in 2008. (Mann 2008). I’ve posted before but note how many sources of temperature data are in that dataset. All agreeing with recent temperature increases and a hockey stick.
Then you have all these:
We start with the original MBH hockey stick as replicated by Wahl and Ammann:
[IMG]http://www.realclimate.org/images/WA_RC_Figure1.jpg[/IMG]
And what about the hockey stick that Oerlemans derived from glacier retreat since 1600?
[IMG]http://www.realclimate.org/images/oerlemans.jpg[/IMG]
How about Osborn and Briffa’s results which were robust even when you removed any tree of the records?
[IMG]http://www.realclimate.org/wp-content/uploads/OB06.jpg[/IMG]
Or there. The hockey stick from borehole temperature reconstructions perhaps?
[IMG]http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/images/smpollackrecon.gif[/IMG]
No. How about the hockey stick of CO2 concentrations from ice cores and direct measurements?
[IMG]http://cses.washington.edu/cig/figures/ipccar4co2.gif[/IMG]
Err… not even close. What about the the impact on the Kaufman et al 2009 Arctic reconstruction?
[IMG]http://www.realclimate.org/images/kaufman_noyamal.jpg[/IMG]
Oh. The hockey stick you get when you don’t use tree-rings at all (blue curve)?
[IMG]http://www.realclimate.org/images/M08.jpg[/IMG]
No. Well what about the hockey stick blade from the instrumental record itself?
[IMG]http://www.realclimate.org/images/had.jpg[/IMG]
Nah….
Not a lot of text. Just a lot of published peer reviewed data.

Regarding the hockey stick, here’s Monckton’s long paper describing the shenanigans behind protecting it from criticism and “verifying” it, followed (pages 16-29) by summaries of 21 published papers that provide evidence of warming during the MWP. (Ten papers deal with Europe and the North Atlantic, eleven scientific papers address the period elsewhere on the planet.) Each summary occupies about half a page and contains a graph that illustrates key data points.http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/what_hockey_stick.html

John K. Sutherland (11:10:30) :
Thank you, John, for the reference to Charles Mackay’s book ‘Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions’ published in 1841.
The first line of the preface is very pertinent.
“In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals,
they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of
excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find
that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and
go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously
impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is
caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”
Sums it all up!

@ Mapou (00:42:49) :
Mapou (00:42:49) :
Marsh wrote: “This isn’t fraud at all. The post 1960s decline in temperatures is false whichever way you look at it, so “hiding the decline” is substituting bad data for good. For it to have been fraud he would have had to do it the otherway round – replace good data with bad.”
_________________________________________________
You misread my post, sir. That quote was from cthulhu (11:16:30) : which I placed in my post in order to respond to it. It is NOT my statement.
In fact I DO get it, which you would have known had you read my post in its entirety.

Re: Somite (07:29:53)
A good example of the confusion I mwentioned i n a previous post.
No-one is denying that the worls is warmer now than it was 150 years ago (a good thing too). The question is whether this warming is in any way unusual. There is pleny of good reason to think that it isn’t.
Actually Ive just had a look at some of your links and you don’t appear to understand what you’re posting.

Somite,
So you are quoting works from the disgraced scientists to prove that the work from the disgraced scientists is not, ahem, disgraced. And to ram home the point, you provide links to a website known to be the propaganda arm of the disgraced scientists. I see how your logic works.

MikeN (09:14:03) :
“Why are you accusing Briffa of cherry-picking trees? What is the evidence for this?”
I believe it was because he selected 10 trees from a sample of 65 trees, where those selected had definate hockey stick characteristics while the other 55 did not. One in particular (Yamal61) exhibited such an outrageously large hockey stick shape that it alone accounted for much of the hockey-stickness of even the other 9.
Briffa has still not given any explanation for selecting those 10 trees and the exercise in dishonesty was so blatant that even arch alarmist Tom Wigley wrote how Briffa had gotten himself into a mess.
Is that cherry picking enough for you?

I have a serious problem with this….. IF the decline does indeed show that “reconstruction” is totally unreliable, that temps went way North when the reconstruction shows it should be heading South, does this not mean that things are actually way worse than we thought? And if “reconstruction” can’t be relied upon, how do we know anything charted during the MWP is in any way accurate when no one measured the actual temperature?

Excellent article, but I have a question. Forgive me if it’s already been answered in the 100’s of comments above.
If the proxy data cannot be trusted, then how can you validate that the MWP actually happened? It seems you can’t have both. The original chart 7c, according to the hacked e-mails, might as well have been drawn on a cocktail-napkin. Maybe the IPCC had a good reason for replacing that chart?
If that is true, then they have done a disservice by not explaining themselves. I will be witholding judgment until the UN inquiry is complete.

“Of course the planet warms after an ice age is over. Even a 5th grader can understand that. The years after the little ice age that ended around 1850 are what they wanted to focus on only that period and distract you from the reason why the earth has warming and cooling periods this dramatic, substituting the reason the planet warms is you. It’s your fault. I wonder why they did that?”
It’s this attitude from warming skeptics that I find most fascinating. To take personal umbrage to the idea that human activities have contributed to climate change. I don’t feel personally responsible for the past 200 years, any more than I would for possibly human-induced extinction of ice age megafuana in North America 20k years ago. To feel that threatened seems to imply somekind of guilt. Also reminds me of the NIMBY attitude.

Even NASA has sequestered and is holding data under the pressure of a FOIA request for the last two years. It is requiring the efforts of the applicant and his attorneys to release it.
There was a state climatologist in Oregon who was fired by the governor because he did not ‘believe enough’ in AGW…..
The impact of this fraud will affect people’s liberties and taxes for generations.
Science is a platform to apply an application of measurement ‘standards’ to determine if a hypothesis can be made into a theory.
Unfortunately, science is made into a religion by ‘scientists’ that seek to gain truth by their peers and by an aggregate of politics in both government and academia that will ‘pay’ their way to the next discoveries.
Outcome based science is rampant and truth is not the golden mean anymore. The ‘feel good’ objectives and directives of schools and of society in the last 30-40 or so years and motivations that promote ‘self esteem’ standards have replaced the desire for ‘truth’ for a marketing cliché “does it sell”?
Ocean levels are obviously cyclic over periods of time and based on the glaciations that occur over large areas of land mass, thus changing the level of oceans. Based on assumed factors that the worlds mass and volume of water in liquid and solid form is roughly fixed, excluding the small fractional amount in the air, and the land mass is roughly static in form or placement for the last million years, then the largest influencing variable is heat.
Using this reference chart for the last million years then you can see that there is an approximate maximum ocean level that we are presently enjoying.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Se…temp_140ky.gif
With the trends that are so obvious and repeatable who is willing to say that this recent event that started 18 thousand years ago is special?
This argument does not refute the imperative necessity to ensure that the resources we use are utilized efficiently, and the output of our consumption should be clean as possible or practical..

SLEAZY DOES IT
As with the pirates of CRU, American warmers know how to conceal the truth, as wellhttp://www.john-daly.com/stations/badwater.htm“The plaque claims Death Valley recorded the hottest air temperature anywhere in the world on 17th July 1998 – implying it was an all-time world record. It was not. It was referring to 1998 only. Actually, the hottest temperature ever recorded at Death Valley was way back in 1913 on 10th July – a whopping 134°F (57°C).”
They are all cut from the same cloth, or, more accurately, moth eaten rag.

In 1890’s, Arrhenius built upon Fourier’s assessment of atmospheric properties plotting CO2 and temperature data collected in industrialized England. Arrhenius’ plots and calculations related CO2 and ambient temperatures. Callendar (1930’s) extended the analysis using long term observations from 200 stations reiterating the relation between CO2 and climate warming. Keeling (1950’s) began collecting atmospheric CO2 samples at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii which is the most complete record.
USGS reports all volcanic activity produces nearly 200-million tons CO2 annually; although much less than human activity production. Mauna Loa, near the Observatory and the world’s most active volcano, had major eruptions in 1950, 1975, and 1984. Atmospheric CO2 levels measured at volcanoes indicate the degree of activity and estimated heat flow from one volcano are reported at140-mW/m2. Correlating CO2 and temperatures data collected near active volcanoes should be significant but not show a cause and effect relation; however, correlating world-wide data significantly shows CO2 lagging temperature by approximately two years. Arrhenius and Callendar analysis similarly could be significantly biased owing to urban heat-island effects and extensive coal burning at the time, as CO2 is an abundant byproduct of burning.
Apparently, no laboratory control experiment to date, such as in a biodome, has shown CO2 levels influencing ambient temperatures. Tyndall (1861) measured the absorptive characteristics of CO2 followed by more precise measurements by Burch (1970). Absorbance is a measure of the quantity of light (energy) absorbed by a sample (CO2 molecule) and the amount of absorbed energy can be represented as specific heat of a substance. Specific heat of CO2 ranges from 0.791-kJ/kgK at 0-degrees F to 0.871-kJ/kgK at 125-degrees F and average atmospheric concentrations are 0.0306-percent. As revealed, the specific heat of CO2 increases as ambient temperatures increase showing CO2 likely is an ambient temperature buffer.
The atmosphere contains from 4-percent water vapor in the troposphere to 40-percent near the surface. Specific heat of water vapor relatively remains constant at 1.996-kJ/kgK. Water absorbs energy (heat) and evaporates to water vapor. During condensation (precipitation), latent heat is released to the atmosphere thus increasing ambient temperatures. Water vapor holds the majority of atmospheric heat and regulates climate and temperature more than any compound. Historically, however, water vapor characteristics as related to climate were much less appreciated, but investigations concerning the significance water vapor plays in global climate-dynamics are just beginning.
Energy not stored in the atmosphere is released into space through radiation. Re-radiation is the emission of previously absorbed radiation by molecules. Specific heat of water vapor and CO2 molecules shows that water vapor reradiates significantly more energy back to the surface and this case further is justified by quantities of each compound. Thus, this synopsis and other publications suggest that minute variations in atmospheric CO2 concentrations likely results in an insignificant affect on climate; whereas water vapor likely is the significant factor. Nevertheless, this argument easily could be rectified with an appropriate biodome-type control experiment.

guess i’m just stupid, but i read the article three times, and didn’t get the point of it. 1980 disappears (or something to that effect) where is 1980 on the graph. what disappeared ?
i live in north cen tral iowa, and i can tell that we did NOT have a steep rise in temps in 1998, based on the temp reports that are published in my utility bills since 1991

When life started 4 billion years ago I thought the atmosphere was 30% carbon dioxide and 30% methane. Methane is often quoted as being 30 times worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, which would mean that there would be [in effect] over 30,000 times more greenhouse gas than there is today. The oxygen producing bacteria that make stromatolites live on the seashore, and they are not extremophiles so the Earth’s climate at that time can not have been far removed from today.
This would be my test for any climate model, to plug in the values for Earth’s early atmosphere and get a result which we know must have been conducive to life. I suspect the current climate models have in-built ‘biases’ to promote the idea that trace amounts of CO2 control the Earth’s climate totally, and putting in these high values of CO2 and methane would have the climate models suggest the Earth’s surface would be hot enough to boil lead!

Hmm. The unprecedented melting of the ice caps must be a figment of my imagination.
There’s clearly some amount of risk hat man-made climate change will do serious harm. Even if you think there’s an 80% chance that the climate models and real-world measurement are wrong, it seems ludicrous to gamble your progeny’s future on a on that bet. If you had a 1 in 5 five chance of dying the next time you got in your car, would you still do it? The stakes are enormous if the models and measures prove to be right, yet people are perfectly willing to take that gamble. Amazing.
All of this is an eerie reminder how easily people will disregard evidence, ignore risks, and believe what they want to believe. It happens in every economic speculative bubble. Now it’s happening with climate change. Let the good times roll!

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on Thu Aug 21, 2008 reported: “The first half of 2008 was the coolest for at least five years, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Wednesday. The whole year will almost certainly be cooler than recent years, although temperatures remain above the historical average.”
Yet on 5 December 2009 they reported at the Copenhagen Summit: “This decade is the warmest on record and 2009 is likely to rank as the fifth warmest year since the beginning of instrumental climate recordings in 1850.”
Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said the Office analysed land temperature data using a computer code developed by CRU. She said CRU also supplied the Met Office with original data from some remote weather stations which had a significant impact on the global average.
This sudden backflip for the IPCC and Copenhagen Summit is making many wonder if the WMO are the latest to have adopted Michael Mann’s “trick” of massaging data to suit a preconceived agenda!
Cheers,
Denis Maclaine
Brisbane, Australia

OKE E DOKE, here’s the gist of it.
This article makes the point that the infamous “hide the decline” remark was about a huge problem with the AGW alarmists’ methodology for teasing temperature information from “proxies,” like tree rings. The problem is that the proxy info indicated that temperatures had been declining during the last 1/5 of the 20th century, when most other data (especially including ground station measurements) showed that temperatures were rising significantly.
That means their methodology for deducing temperatures from proxies DOES NOT WORK. It has been falsified by actual temperature measurements in the 1980s and 1990s.
That is critically important, because that temperature-from-proxy methodology is the ENTIRE basis for the now-infamous “hockey stick” graph. It was the SOLE basis for erasing the Medieval Warm Period from history.
The truth, as revealed by these emails, is that the IPCC’s leading climatologists were LYING. They were telling the world that there was no doubt whatsoever that late 20th century warming was unprecedented in history, because of the assured reliability of their proxy-derived temperature reconstructions, and that anyone who disagreed was a “denier,” implicitly akin in disreputableness to Holocaust Deniers. But the truth is that they KNEW full well that their methodology for deducing temperatures from proxies was unreliable, and they struggled mightily to “hide” that inconvenient truth.
This scandal is HUGE. It may eclipse Piltdown Man as the worst scientific scandal in history.
The leading climate research institutions & they key players in the IPCC (Mann, Jones, Hansen, Briffa, Kelly, Schmidt, Overpeck, Santer, Wigley, Osborn, Trenberth, Karl) etc., are ALL up to their eyebrows in this. The field of climate change research is a cesspool of intellectual dishonesty.
Their models don’t work. The models have been falsified by the temperature record, yet the so-called “leading” climate researchers doggedly stick by them. Defending the ideology & political agenda to which they are wedded has become more important to them than telling the Truth.
These guys have abandoned the scientific method!
You probably know how the Method is supposed to work:
1. The scientist observes the available data.
2. He formulates hypotheses to explain the observations.
3. He derives testable predictions from the hypotheses.
4. He devises tests or observations to test the testable predictions.
5. He does the tests or makes the observations.
6. If the test results match the predictions, he cries “eureka!” and publishes his theory.
7. If the test results fail to match the predictions, the theory is said to be “falsified,” so he discards or revises it and starts over at step 2, with the new observations or test results added to the body of available data.
Instead of discarding or revising their falsified models, these so-called scientists revise the data!!!!
And then they delete the original, raw data, so that nobody else can check their work.
That is the WORST kind of scientific dishonesty.
W/r/t the deleted data, I cite two documents to prove my accusation:
1. The first was email document 1107454306 from Jones to Mann. Jones says that if McIntyre requests the station data under the Freedom Of Information Act, he (Jones) will delete it rather than let McIntyre see it:http://www.burtonsys.com/FOIA/1107454306.txt
Note that to do that without getting in trouble with the law they would have to lie and claim it had been deleted earlier… a prospect which apparently does not trouble them at all.
2. This Sunday Times (of London) article about the declaration from UAE CRU that they cannot comply with legal demands for the raw temperature data because they have deleted much of it:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
And, whaddya know, they say it was deleted long ago (though they’d previously given a variety of other excuses for refusing FOI requests for the same data).
The bottom line is that these guys have proven themselves to be utterly untrustworthy. You can’t believe anything they say. (See Luke 16:10)
They’ve been claiming, stridently, that the earth is still warming. But if you read the leaked emails, you will see that even they know that isn’t so. They may expect the warming to resume, or they may doubt their measurements, but they KNOW that the temperature measurements indicate that the warming has ceased.
The earth ceased warming at least a decade ago.
Of all the actual temperature records (as opposed to so-called “proxies,” which are far less reliable), the records which showed the MOST warming were the surface station measurements, the most complete record of which are from the USA, where we’ve been making such measurements since 1880.
Argo buoys (deep ocean temperature measurements), radiosonde (atmospheric temperature measurements), sea surface temperature measurements, and satellite-based measurements ALL failed to show much if any warming (or at least they failed to show warming until the people discredited by this scandal “corrected” the data). But, we were told, the surface station measurements nevertheless proved the warming.
But now we know of widespread problems with the surface stations, which cause them to significantly overstate warming (see http://www.surfacestations.org). And then McIntyre discovered a major blunder by NASA, which had caused them to misreport 21st century surface station temperatures as warmer than they actually were. (And he found it despite the inexcusable fact that NASA/Hansen wouldn’t allow him access to the raw data!!!)
When NASA corrected that error 2.5 years ago, it made 1934 the warmest year on record.
That’s right. Not 2008. Not 2007. Not even 1998. 1934!
Still-unexplained “corrections” subsequently made by NASA/Hansen on the U.S. surface station data have bumped 1934 back down to 3rd-warmest. The surface station data for the USA keeps getting revised in suspicious ways by Hansen & Co. at NASA. Yet, even if their latest numbers are correct (which is highly doubtful), it still shows that 5 of the 6 warmest (we used to say “mildest”) years on record since 1880 were more than a decade ago, and 3 of the 6 warmest were 75+ years ago!!!
Facts like that kind of make the current warming hysteria seem silly, don’t they?
For the rest of the world, the surface station data was in the tender care of Phil Jones & the UEA CRU — where they have conveniently “lost” much of the raw data:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
The bottom line is that the overwhelming weight of the evidence indicates that:
1) The leading climate change alarmists are utterly untrustworthy. And,
2) In the last quarter of the 20th century the earth was, indeed, warming, though not as much as the alarmists would have you believe. However,
3) Temperatures peaked in about 1998, plateaued, and then began declining.
4) The “settled science” nonsense predicting accelerating warming is totally discredited.
Those are the FACTS.
(Facts #3 & #4 should be cause for rejoicing, BTW, if you care more about the welfare of mankind and her planet than you do about being right!)
Now, there are many possible explanations for fact #3 (the end of warming a decade ago). NONE of them change the fact that the IPCC/alarmist models have been falsified. But there are still plausible scenarios for resumed warming, and continued concern.
One possibility is that the models greatly underestimated the effects of the sun, and the current unexpectedly long lull in the solar cycle has caused a cooling effect that is masking an underlying warming trend. If that is the case, then the warming should resume when the solar cycle resumes. If that happens, then we’ll need to grapple with the warming issue once again.
Another possibility for which there is evidence is that the models grossly underestimated the effects of CFCs. CFC levels are now declining, which could be the cause of the temperature decline. If that is the case, then warming will not resume when the solar cycle resumes.
Or it could be a combination of both of those causes, and/or some others.
But, regardless of what happens, the Kyoto/Copenhagen/Cap-and-tax schemes can’t possibly be a solution. Even if additional CO2 is actually causing warming (which is doubtful), there is NO possibility that these schemes could do more than slightly delay the effects.
Even Hansen realizes that. He’s a true believer in CO2 as the main AGW villain (I think he’s dead wrong), but he recognizes that the slight CO2 reductions achievable by these schemes can’t solve the problem. He says the Copenhagen approach is “fundamentally wrong,” and hopes the talks collapse.
Like a stopped clock, even James Hansen is accidentally right once in a while.

Complaints concerning the statement “hiding the decline” are without sense or foundation. The decline referred to is the divergence between tree-ring data and that of the instrumental temperature record since about 1960. Before 1960 the temperature records derived from a) tree -rings and b) instrumental sources (eg. thermometers – as shown in the HADCRUT3 series started in 1850) agreed well with one another. But since 1960 that is no longer the case: since then the measured trees have been growing more slowly than would be expected. Thus, using these trees as temperature proxies would give the impression that there was a decline in temperature since 1960 compared to what actually happened. There has been a lot of discussion in the scientific literature about this puzzling fact: it may be caused by pollution, disease, damaging UV because of reduced stratospheric ozone or something else. But, whatever the cause, it means that tree-ring data can no longer, since 1960, be used as a reliable temperature proxy.
Hence, when attempting to produce a graph of temperature for the last, say, 1000 years, there is a problem. For most of that time only proxies (eg tree-rings) are available: but for the last few decades such tree-rings are not reliable. The “trick” consists of joining the two sources of information (proxies and instrumental) together so that the recent “decline”, (as the recent tree-ring anomaly is called), can be substituted by the instrumental data.
Rather than being a source of confusion and denial concerning temperature reconstructions, the evidence for the “decline” should rather prompt questions as to the health of trees and concern about what the evidence of their slower rate of growth is telling us about the general health of our environment.
If you wish to see another clear explanation of this (and other email hack issues), I recommend:

Slioch, did you even bother to read Marc Sheppard’s article? He explained the chicanery very well.
The reason the earlier temperature measurements are fairly well-correlated with the proxy-derived temperature reconstructions is that those earlier temperatures are the temperatures which were used to calibrate the methodology. They HAD to match!
The problem is that the temperatures “reconstructed” by the methodology don’t match reality for OTHER time periods, such as the 1980s & 1990s, but also the Medieval Warm Period.
It means the method doesn’t work.
Sometimes that happens. A researcher has what seems like a great idea, but it just doesn’t pan out. What that happens, he is supposed to Man Up and admit the truth. Integrity requires it. In the conclusion of my own master’s thesis, I wrote, “We concluded that, for most applications, [our method] does not work very well…” Unfortunately, Jones, Mann, Briffa, et al, were unwilling to do that.

Dave Burton (09:23:41) :
Of course the tree-ring data were calibrated against the instrumental record, but it does not follow from that that they HAD to match: rather, in order for tree-rings to be used at all as a temperature proxy, they HAD to correlate, at least within acceptable limits of error. If it had been found that there was little or no correlation between the tree-rings and temperature then the method would never have got off the ground at all. It did get off the ground because they did correlate.
The most useful question to address now is “why has that correlation broken down after 1960?”. I confess I haven’t looked into the putative answers to that question in detail (I intend to), but I suggest that the answer may lie in a) increased tree diseases – there are numerous fungal tree diseases and insect pest that were formerly restricted in range that have been spread around the world by human activities, and b) atmospheric effects due to such factors as acid rain and black carbon or sulphate aerosols or low level ozone or other anthropogenic pollution.
But all that is something of a distraction from the main point of this post: the meaning of the “hide the decline” phrase. That phrase was used between individuals very familiar with the tree-ring data as acknowledgement that the post-1960 tree ring data was unreliable and needed to be replaced with the instrumental. To make out that it was evidence of fraud is scurrilous nonsense which will come back to haunt climate sceptics as people desperate to grasp at any straw, however absurd.

There is no reason to believe that the post-1960 tree ring temperature reconstructions are any less reliable than the pre-1880 tree ring temperature reconstructions, and especially the 900-1300 AD temperature reconstructions.
Indeed, the paucity of data for the more ancient dates makes those temperature reconstructions even WEAKER than the post-1960 temperature reconstructions.
BTW, have you noticed that the AGW alarmists’ sea level stats are wrong, too?
Last night I saw James Hansen on Letterman repeating (among other dubious claims) the statistic that the oceans have been rising 1.8mm/year for the past century or so. So I went to noaa.gov and downloaded their table of Mean Sea Level (MSL) changes for 159 locations around the globe.
The amounts of sea level change varied drastically, from one location to another. The greatest change was a 3 foot decline in MSL for Vaasa, Finland. The greatest increase in MSL was a 2.1 foot rise in MSL for Galveston, TX.
So I calculated two types of averages for the data, and the median.
Guess what? Neither the median nor the averages were anywhere near the claimed 1.8mm/year.
The median was just 1.1mm/year, or 39% lower than the claimed 1.8mm/year.
The averages were even lower, at 0.5-0.6mm/year, or only about 1/3 of the claimed 1.8mm/year.
Considering all the other chicanery from those folks, I can’t say that I’m much surprised.
I put up a web page with the results, here:http://tinyurl.com/MSLavg
Dave

Siloch,
So If I understand you correctly you are guessing that tree-ring proxies are valid thermometer and temperature mismatch after 1960s is actually man-made which means that all of the data before 1960 is good? That is very interesting supposition. Actually it’s quite perfect. Not only we responsible for screwing up weather, we also managed to screw up indicators of our screw ups. Oh the evil of man!
On slightly more serious note, has there been any attempts made to validate this assertion? It shouldn’t be that hard to find some remote areas that are not subject to man’s influences. (Oh wait, that is probably why Briffa had picked his single tree in Siberia. It’s just strange that all the other trees located few tens of kilometers away didn’t quite do it for him)

SLIOCH,
I THOT THAT CO2 LEVELS HAVE INCREASED DRAMATICALLY SINCE 1960..
I ALSO THOT THAT TREE GROWTH RATES WERE GENERALLY INCREASED DURING
THIS PERIOD BECAUSE OF THE CO2 INCREASE
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR TREES ??

Could someone please help me with this response from an obvious warmist. The response was made on a board many frequent from a well known commercial buying and selling site – not being scientifically minded myself, could I ask for your assisatance please? Many thanx.——————————————————————————–The Watts Up With That article
Quote:Add yesterday’s announcement of a UN investigation into the matter, which will no doubt be no less corrupt than those being investigated
No doubt the article would be calling for such an investigation if they had not announced it. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
Quote:it was not the temperature decline the planet has been experiencing since 1998 that Jones and friends conspired to hide. Certainly, the simple fact that the email was sent in November of 1999 should have allayed any such confusion
No it is NOT because there has not been a decline since 1998. 8 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since then, including 2005* which is the warmest year on record.
*If you ever read an article written in the last 4 years that says 1998 is the warmest year on record you know it is a fraud – they are using the unofficial GISS scale not the official US government NOAA scale so they can make the claim that temperatures have fallen since 1998.
There then follows a long discussion of the hockey stick that is full of half truths and sciency sounding statement but ar misleading. For example ….
Quote:Here’s the original reconstruction, with the three proxy and measured temperature (black) series intact:
They then make a big deal about how some of the reconstruction end in a downward trend but subsequently show an upward trend. Saying:
Quote:But I defy anyone to compare the above chart – the one Jones wrote he had applied MNT to – to the unadulterated version above it, and tell me there’s been no deception committed.
The red plot is the same between the two. The green plot still has the dip but in the first chart ended in 1950, in the second chart had been updated to end in 2000.
Hello! The main warming has occurred since 1970 so of course the plots will go up if you include that data. Same for the blue.
The author states that tree rings are just one of the proxies used for temperature reconstructions, the rest of the article makes it sound like it is the only one.
Why do tree ring data start becoming unreliable in the second half of the 20th century? The technique uses nuclear isotopes – so what have we been doing since then that might affect the trees – it would nothing to do with letting off atomic bombs and the building of lots of nuclear power stations? No, of course not – much more reasonable to believe there is a world wide conspiracy of scientists to implement political policies that for the most part they do not care about.
PS I note in this “learned” discussion that he ignores totally the gray areas around the Mann plots, That is the uncertainties and the plots of the medieval warm period fits neatly in that gray envelope. The reason? Is that you get the warm period if and only if you use only the western European and eastern US data. Thats how you determine the stability of your reconstruction by omitting various sub sets of data so the M&M medeval warm period result result is a cherry picked subset of the Mann data.
PPS I also note that if you take Moberg plot – Mann’s contention still holds this is the fastest rise seen in 2000 years. The appearance of the medeval warm period is slow – it takes 400 years to reach a peak. The current warming has taken just 100 years, some argue 40 years.
PPPS Note the Moberg plot also omits the latest 30 years of data when the most extreme increases in global temperatures have occurred so you can add another 0.5C to the end of his plot which would take it off scale.
I wonder why they forgot to mention that?
It must be a global conspiracy to falsify the data (or deliberately distoort it).
But who would have anything to gain by doing that? (Hint it rhyms with soil, lass, and foal)

First of all, that snarky warmist has no clue what he’s talking about. He’s just glowing smoke. E.g., this objection is pure nonsense:
“Why do tree ring data start becoming unreliable in the second half of the 20th century? The technique uses nuclear isotopes – so what have we been doing since then that might affect the trees – it would nothing to do with letting off atomic bombs and the building of lots of nuclear power stations? No, of course not – much more reasonable to believe there is a world wide conspiracy of scientists to implement political policies that for the most part they do not care about.”
Wrong. Tree ring-based temperature reconstructions do NOT use nuclear isotopes, they use tree ring density/width measurements.
Second, while it is true that Hansen’s NASA/GISS data is suspect, it is actually suspect for OVERSTATING warming, not understating it. Yet here’s what NASA was saying for U.S. “lower 48” temperatures two years ago, in September of 2007:http://web.archive.org/web/20070914231348/http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt
The six mildest years on record (since 1880) in the lower-48 states of the continental USA were listed as:
#1: 1934
#2: 1998
#3: 1921
#4: 2006
#5: 1931
#6: 1999
Note that 1934 (not 1998 or 2005 or 2006) was listed as the warmest year on record, and 3 of the 6 were 75+ years ago.
NASA/Hansen have since revised the data several times (they won’t say how or why!), so that 1934 has been bumped from #1 position on the list. But those six are still the six warmest years listed even in the current version of their list, and 3 of the 6 warmest were 75+ years ago.
(I chose “six warmest” rather than 5 or 10 warmest, because it happens that the same 6 years are listed as warmest in all the versions of the NASA GISS file that I could find on archive.org, though in varying order; if you use 5 or 10 then some years drop off the list in some versions of the file.)
Note that this is based on U.S. surface station measurements, which are biased toward warming due to siting issues, urban encroachment, and probably institutional bias (Hansen!). Satellite, radiosonde & Argo buoy (deep ocean) measurements show even less evidence of warming.
Note: The U.S. surface station network is the best and longest-running in the world, outside of England. England’s heavily Gulf Stream-influenced island climate makes it a poor proxy for the world as a whole, unlike the U.S.
Note that even global sea level rise statistics seem to have been fudged by the AGW alarmists. They’ve been claiming a global average mean sea level increase of 1.8 mm/year, but it is really only about 1/3 of that, and many locations have seen sea level decreasese instead of increases:http://tinyurl.com/MSLavg
Dave

I may be paranoid, having had a Christian upbringing but here goes. I have a gut feeling there is a small group of very influential people plotting control of the worlds populations. They can do it by controlling resources including food, economically, or by law enforcement. Using climate-change has back-fired on THEM hugely, even to the point of waking the apathetic. Could it be that all of the political push to get Darwins Theory TOTALLY accepted and Christians painted as mentally unstable have a parallel with this? I feel pressured to stop eating meat and stop thinking of myself as created in the image of God, instead I should become like the eugenics who believe each human life is not sacred but that even animals have the same status and rights as myself. Next stop a mark on my forehead?

this article say just what the average american wants to hear: we are not guilt of anything, these foreign suckers are just jealous of our mighty… let’s keep eating our cheese-burgers, driving our SUVs and drinking our beer until our belly explodes, fuck them, we are smarter!
these graphs and numbers are nonsense, they can be twisted the way you want. they can tell us the world is warming, coolling, static, changing, or whatever your agenda wants them to say. I’m not advocating GW here, I’m saying both sides can use these numbers to say whatever they want.
but this whole argument misses the point that we are indeed pillaging this planet at an alarming rate. at the current speed that we build more and more metropolis, empty the oceans and ruin the natural balance of the world with inconceivable amounts of garbage and pollution… who cares about weather change? we are going to transform Earth in a wasteland either way

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